Northland
by avocadomoon
Summary: "You were never afraid of me," Liv says. Yuletide gift for ChokolatteJedi.


Ravi's house is inaccessible by car, which makes sense even though it's really horribly inconvenient. He sends her a map in an encrypted email, with highlighted directions. Liv prints out a copy and carries it around with her for days, memorizing it, keeping it folded into a square in her bra, never laying it down for more than a second. Then she shreds the paper into tiny strips and washes them down the sink.

To get a flight Liv needs fake papers and a professional disguise, neither of which come cheap. But she's got money, money's never been her issue, and she gets it done, quietly and quickly. Ravi sends her more emails every week, with benign messages - _how's the weather down there? Heard there was rain coming. The kids are pretty restless to get back to school, but enjoying the last of their summer holiday. Did you ever get around to replacing that old car of yours? Your brother told me you had to replace the brakes._

Liv's not sure if he's trying to tell her something, in some kind of oblique code, but if he is doing that then she doesn't know what it is, and so she replies back with whatever strikes her at the current moment, for lack of a better idea: _my car gave up the ghost, finally. Hit a really bad pothole and it killed my suspension. Glad to hear the kids are giving you some hell - you probably deserve it! Give them my love. Can't wait to see you._

Ravi doesn't have kids. If it is code then she thinks he might mean Clive and Dale, which is sort of funny to think about. What's also funny is the idea that Ravi really is trying to communicate some sort of specific information, and is currently sitting at his computer getting as frustrated as she is, trying to decipher her replies.

Well, she'll find out eventually. Catching a ferry to the mainland is no big deal - Liv's been doing it for years, there're plenty of ways to sneak your way into the city without going through the CDC's travel protocols. There are five or six routes that ferry goods back and forth between Seattle and Zombie Island - set up by a few enterprising corporations, who correctly identified a very willing, trapped market of not-quite-people willing to pay whatever they had to for comfortable clothes and books and all the other things you need to make life bearable on your quarantined deserted island. Liv's made friends with a few of the ferry captains, and they let her ride along hidden in some closet for a few hundred bucks, whenever she needs to.

The airport is harder. Liv's very professional, very good disguise makes her look like a younger version of her mother - dull brown hair, business suit, prosthetics on her face to elongate her nose and widen her jawline. It itches like _hell._ She's spent weeks practicing an accent but abandons it last second, out of fear that she'll slip up - it's a thirteen-hour flight, after all. She may not need sleep but even zombies get punchy after a couple straight days of activity.

She gets there seven hours early so she can go through security at the shift change - white knuckles it through the x-rays, plasters a bland, bored look on her face as they take her picture. Airports are, ironically, the safest way for zombies to travel nowadays - the border officials at the Washington state lines all have blood testing equipment. There's only two main highways that still can take you out of the state, and both of them have major checkpoints - impossible to fake your way through, even with the best disguise money can buy. Airports on the other hand are still governed by the TSA, which is as haphazard and inefficient as ever - the strictest measure they take are the mug shots of all the passengers, which as far as Liv's been able to tell all go into some database that nobody ever looks at, ever. No money for blood tests, and no way to effectively administer them safely without risking lawsuits. Bottlenecking the interstates like the government did means that almost _everybody_ flies, if they're traveling in or out of Washington, and thus Sea-Tac has almost tripled in size over the past decade. There's just too many _people_ for them to really check everybody - random security checks are the worst of her worries, and Liv's cover as a boring, thirtysomething white woman is the best protection against that.

Not that she _isn't_ a boring, thirtysomething white woman. But the definition of "woman" is what's usually in question.

Anyway, she makes it. Her closest call is the agent who's checking IDs, who makes a joke about her being so early for her flight - "nervous flier," she says, deepening her voice slightly, like Clive once taught her to do to disguise her voice on a phone. "Didn't want to take any chances. You know how much this ticket cost me?"

"Auckland, huh? Yeah, I bet," the agent says. He's a human, very obviously so, young with acne scars on his face. Liv had picked his line based on the fidgety way he was twitching in his chair, rolling back and forth, shaking out his neck every few minutes. Distracted - at the end of his shift, clearly. Thinking about home, the traffic, what to make for dinner. Human things. "Vacation or business?"

"Vacation," Liv says, smiling a little as he hands back her passport and boarding pass. "Going to see an old friend."

"That's nice," he says, nodding her on through. Liv will remember his name for a long time - Joseph Hartwell. Thinking about this day, years from now, she'll say to herself, _thanks, Joey. You really did me a solid._

On average, there are fourteen zombies arrested every day in the city of Seattle. That's an average, remember - skewed by the mass arrests that take place during raids. The MPs will wait for weeks - months, sometimes - once they know about a group of zombies living on the mainland, gathering intel and performing surveillance before arresting them all at once, usually at big group events. For a lot of zombies, this means family gatherings - Thanksgiving, Christmas. Birthday parties, family reunions.

It's not illegal for zombies to live on the mainland, but they have to follow the CDC protocols to do it, which are ridiculously unreasonable. The rations of grey matter dispersed by the government are barely enough to live on, and it's illegal for a zombie to take the donations supplied by zombie-friendly charities and organizations, which means their only options are Zombie Island - within a quarantine, plenty of donated brain to go around there - or trying to squeak by on the mainland, pretending to follow the CDC rules while getting your food supply on the downlow. Liv went back to her old Renegade habits for awhile, helping to smuggle families in and out - there are friendly enclaves in other areas, California being the most welcoming bordering state - Canada is always an option too, the laws up there are much more humane - but her face was too recognizable, and she became a liability. But then again - that's what she's always been, really.

What happens to the zombies after they're arrested, no one knows. The official public statement says that they are relocated to a secure, quarantined location, but Liv is pretty confident about calling bullshit on that. Nobody ever sees them again, is the bottom line. Liv would prefer not to think about the specifics.

Sitting at an airport restaurant, Liv sips a cocktail she can't taste and opens her phone to another email from Ravi. There's an attachment, a photo, and the message is more bland nonsense - _You're allergic to peanuts, right? Was planning on Thai for dinner once you get here but can get something else if you prefer!_ Liv reads it three times, and thinks suddenly about the last time she'd seen Ravi's face, almost eight years ago - on a television screen, announcing his resignation from the CDC. Liv had watched it on the TV at the small community center on the Island - where they held meetings and gatherings - birthday parties and Thanksgiving potlucks. Ravi wasn't a popular man among the undead, being the public face of the CDC, and most of the people in the room with her had cheered. Liv still remembers the headline scroll beneath his face - "resigns in protest," it had said. None of the zombies Liv knows had really noticed - or cared - about the "in protest" part.

The photo is of a treehouse, in a yard next to a large cornfield. Probably pulled from the internet, although it looks real enough - somebody's Facebook or something, maybe. The postscript of the email says it's something Ravi's been building for "the kids" - maybe he's adopted some dogs or something? Are Clive and Dale even still there? - and he thought she'd like to see it. Liv saves it to her phone, because it must be important, if he sent it to her. They're still reading his emails, after all, and they wouldn't be bothering to do that if he weren't doing something worthy of surveillance.

Then again, they could just be looking for her. Liv can't be sure anymore what the truth is - maybe it's both. It's been a long time since anything they did was safe.

* * *

Liv's home for the past ten years has been a small two-room cabin on Zombie Island with a bunk bed and no electricity, so comparatively speaking, the flight to Auckland is not that bad. She's been sleeping in closets for years, on her smuggling trips into Seattle, so really the extra legroom is kind of nice.

Whatever the situation is in the States, the paranoia clearly hasn't reached New Zealand yet; she practically breezes through customs. Outside the airport, she catches a cab and directs the driver to a hotel in the central business district, a mid-priced chain that she'd found on the internet. Then she goes inside with her suitcase, as if preparing to check in, until the driver leaves. Then she fakes a phone call and leaves.

She's not sure if taxis exist in this city - she hasn't seen any so far - and she's not sure how the buses work, so she just walks for a few miles, abandoning the suitcase at a coffee shop. She hopes somebody who can make use of it finds it, a homeless person or something - the only thing in it are clothes that don't fit that she'd grabbed blindly from the community bin on the island. She has all her cash in a wallet stuffed in her boot leg, and a smuggled container of freeze-dried brain taped to her ribs. She exchanges some of her cash at a gas station - _petrol,_ she'll have to get used to that - and buys a SIM card for her phone. She'd prefer to get a new one altogether, to lower the risk of someone tracing her path from Seattle to here, but she can't lose the information on it - and the email address Ravi's been messaging her from is scrambled somehow, the only way she can reply is by replying to _his_ messages, which she can't do without logging into her account. Tomorrow's problem, she guesses. What she's done so far will just have to be enough.

His house, on the directions she'd memorized, is in the mountains, near a small village an hour and a half away from Auckland by car. Liv's original plan was to rent one, but then the problem of how she'd return it arose, and she resolved to just buy one, either with fake papers or on Craigslist - or whatever equivalent they have here - and then abandon it somewhere. But that had been before the dollar fell a few months ago - not that the U.S. dollar was all that strong normally, what with the biggest public health crisis in generations unfolding upon its shores - but something had happened last fall that had made it fall even further. Something about Chinese markets - she didn't really understand it, even though she had made a somewhat earnest effort to try. Bottom line is that her cash - once exchanged for Kiwi dollars - isn't going to take her as far.

So she steals one. It's not like it's hard - once she ventures out into the quieter suburbs the police presence is almost nothing. She picks an SUV - she's not sure what the roads will be like, the map Ravi had sent made it look like he was living pretty remotely - and hotwires it, which she could do in her sleep, probably. Her time as Renegade taught her a lot of useful things, as it turns out, for this post-Reveal Day, almost-apocalypse world.

The village he's closest to is called Brynderwyn, which appears to be so small that Liv could barely find any information on it at all, outside of a fairly infamous bus crash in the 60s. She couldn't even figure out how many people lived there - not many, obviously. Ravi's house is located fourteen miles northwest of the village center - his directions start at the highway that runs through the settlement. A guidebook she'd purchased her first night in the city has a few pictures - rolling farmlands, picturesque mountain views - and the page on Brynderwyn seems to refer to it as more of a region than an actual town - so really, as small as it gets. On Google Maps, she could see some scattered houses and farms, here and there, along the highway - there's a high school, she knows that, and a few businesses. But a community? Who knows. In a place like that, she can't really imagine Ravi _blending in_ \- in a place so small where everyone knows everyone else? How could he not stand out like a sore thumb?

But then again, he'd said it was safe. In the directions he'd sent, the only communication where he'd spoken openly, he'd said it: _You can't hold out much longer, and I have room for you. I can help. Let me help you._ Liv trusts him. She has to believe this is going to work.

Or at least be better than the alternative, which at this point would be anything. At least this way, if it really goes to hell - she'll be in good company.

The accents down here aren't all that different from Ravi's, so Liv gets used to it fairly quickly. Not that she talks to many people - her prosthetics are starting to come loose, and she's only got a few more days before the glue gives up the ghost. It's one thing to be wearing a bad wig in public, and a whole other thing to have your fake nose fall off in the middle of a conversation, so Liv keeps to herself.

The drive's not bad - paved roads, up until she gets to the spot on Ravi's directions, at which point she turns off onto a country lane, drives a few more miles out of her way, and abandons the SUV in the driveway of a sheep pen. Some farmer will have a headache to deal with - if the police even bother to chase a stolen car this far - but her conscience is clear.

She's got a long hike ahead, so she eats the rest of her brain stash - she's counting on Ravi having food for her at his place, but she has to find his damn house first - and starts off on foot. She's still got much more strength and endurance than a human, but she also doesn't know where she's going, and if she gets lost she's pretty much fucked. Her worst nightmare is going feral, but at least there aren't that many people she could hurt out here, and anyway she's got a plan for that. (She's always had a plan for that.)

Either way, she's pretty sure she's on the right track. Ravi's directions had been detailed, and she gets more and more confident the farther she walks. There's a small dirt road that he had told her to follow (in the few hours it takes her to walk it, she doesn't see a single car), and about five miles down she turns off onto a hiking path - how the hell does he buy groceries? No way he hikes up and down this mountain every week - that takes her the rest of the way. She passes a few driveways that seem to lead nowhere, and a single house, with a row of mailboxes. One of the mailboxes is a repurposed microwave, which makes Liv laugh out loud, for the first time in months.

The landscape is sort of like a tropical forest - familiar but not. The hiking path deepens the further she walks into a rough dirt road, which is overgrown in certain parts by grass. There are plenty of trees and plants she recognizes, and a few she doesn't - and many of the bird calls she hears are completely new to her, too. The house, once she spots it, seems almost disappear into the trees that surround it. A large wall is built up around it, made of dark brown brick. Faintly incredulous, Liv walks slowly along the perimeter of it looking for an intercom, a doorbell, anything. But of course there's nothing.

There's no door, or guard station, like there was at her mother's gated community in East Seattle, with the little guard house by the front gate with a security person who sat there buzzing people in all day. The gate looks like it's meant for a vehicle, but the road leading up to it is soft with grass, and vegetation has been flattened in odd places, by tires that look too small to be a car. Liv crosses her arms, momentarily stumped, and considers doing something stupid and silly to get his attention - he's got to have security cameras, right? If she screamed, or mooned the gate or something, maybe he'd be scandalized enough to just let her in - when she catches sight of a tree that looks kind of familiar.

It's from one of the pictures, the attachments he'd been sending. Liv pulls out her phone - wincing at the red, low battery indicator, and opens up her pictures - sure enough, one of the photos he'd sent was of the bark of this tree, a few yards back from the wall. Walking slowly again, Liv matches a few other spots - she never finds the treehouse, but another picture he'd sent was of a flowering bush that she spots another few yards down. Here, an oddly shaped rock that his email had said was "part of his flower garden" - there, another flower, a beautiful blue one that Liv doesn't recognize, that Ravi had sent as part of his original, first message.

So, she's in the right place, clearly. How to get his attention to let her in is her next problem, which is quickly solved when she walks back to the weird-looking rock and realizes it's sitting on top of a dark green tarp. Pulling back the rock - it's not that heavy, although Liv is fairly sure that it'd be harder to do for a human - beneath the material is a keypad, with letters instead of numbers. Frowning, biting her lip for a second, Liv punches in the only word that comes to mind - TREEHOUSE - and to her relief, the gate opens.

"Freak," Liv says fondly, realizing only now, at the moment that she's actually arrived, how nervous she is to see him. It's been a long time - years, really. Liv hadn't really noticed the time passing, until she found a picture of her brother on the internet and all of a sudden, she did. One second he's fourteen, kicking her out of his hospital room, and the next he's twenty-eight, and Liv's reading his engagement announcement on the Boston Globe website. (He never even came out to her, which was a stupid thing to be hurt by but whatever.)

Ravi's in his forties, now. The most recent picture Liv's seen of him was of the press conference where he announced his resignation, which was eight years ago. He'd looked largely the same - his beard was shorter, more professional-looking, and of course the suit he was wearing was much nicer than anything Liv had seen him wear before, but that was to be expected.

She'd tried not to picture it, had really made a genuine attempt not to obsess over what might be different or the same, but of course it was all she'd thought about on the trip here. Had his hair gone grey? His beard was beginning to, the last time she'd seen him. Just a little salt and pepper - it had suited him. Wrinkles? Had his voice changed, his sense of humor? The world being what it is, he had to have lost at least some of that precious optimism, although Liv hoped he'd kept some of it. He's clearly _more_ paranoid now than he'd been before, for obvious reasons - but does he still drink that hazelnut creamer in his coffee that he bought religiously? Can he even get it, all the way out here? Does he still play video games, talk to his computer like it's a person, listen to old Motown when he's working? Does he still sing along to commercials, and drink orange juice straight from the jug?

It's hard, very hard actually, not to obsess over the concept of aging when you don't do it anymore. Liv looks exactly the same now as she had the day she first met Ravi - God, almost thirteen years ago, now. Has it been that long? It seems impossible.

Would he still make her laugh, the way he used to? Bending over backwards with knock-knock jokes and bad puns, trying to coax a smile out of her like it was his job? Liv hopes so. She really, really does.

* * *

At first glance, she thinks he might not even be here - on the other side of the wall is a modest little yard, not very well taken care of, with the vague, empty feeling that comes from an unoccupied house. Liv pokes around cautiously, finds the mechanism to close the gate on the other side, and jumps a little when the lights on the front porch turn on. It's a long, wraparound deck, with a messy herb garden surrounding - Ravi, a gardener! Wonders never cease - and the house itself is huge, with thick curtains on the windows. Liv approaches cautiously, but she hasn't taken more than a few steps before the front door opens, and finally - _finally_ \- a familiar face.

Liv stops walking, frozen in the middle of his yard, all the air she doesn't need to breathe frozen in her chest. Tall - somehow she'd forgotten how tall he is - his face creased into a smile. A black sweater and big thick boots, with steel toes. Work gloves on his hands, and his hair - streaked with white. Liv tries to smile back, but she's not sure she pulls it off.

"Liv," he says, and tugs his gloves off his hands. Stepping down slowly, still smiling but with concern now, like he's unsure how to approach. "Liv, my God. You made it."

"I did," Liv says, the words coming out in a whisper. Then she clears her throat, remembering herself. "I did. You sent me the directions, didn't you?"

"Well yes, but I wasn't sure - your messages didn't make much sense, I couldn't tell if you'd agreed to come or not." Ravi takes another step, and then pauses, both of them standing there staring at each other, mere feet apart. "My God," he says again, quietly, as if to himself.

"I wasn't sure if you were trying to actually talk, or just throw off whoever it was that was reading the emails," Liv says. "You know I'm no good with this spy shit."

"So says the zombie smuggler," Ravi replies, quick as anything. "I would've come to the airport to meet you, but I've been - there's been a few incidents in Auckland, and showing my face in the city didn't seem like a good idea - "

"It's fine," Liv interrupts, staring. Is he older? She can't tell. He looks the same, aside from his hair. Same eyes, same skin, same nose, same chin. The same Ravi that's lived in her thoughts, all this time. "It's fine, I found it. I, uh, stole a car," she blurts, and then laughs nervously. "Didn't have enough cash to buy one."

"I could've sent you cash."

"Yeah and I would've asked, if I'd figured out your code," Liv replies mindlessly, still just staring, looking hungrily at his face. "Ravi, I - "

"Bullocks," Ravi says, taking a sudden step forward. "Eight bloody years. Come here."

Liv's knees go weak - she didn't know they could still do that - and within the space of one blink to the next, suddenly he's right there in front of her, wrapping his arms around her shoulders. Liv gasps, and reaches up with both hands, grabbing the back of his sweater, her stomach flipping upside down. It's been so long since she's been hugged - and by Ravi Chakrabarti, no less, a man who was always so _good_ at them. Liv always felt like she could face anything, after a Ravi hug.

It's no different now. Liv finds, to her embarrassed horror, that she's tearing up, overwhelmed by the physical reality of it - Ravi, right here. Right here in front of her. Hugging Ravi. Ravi, in person. God, she's _missed him,_ she realizes. She's gotten very good at ignoring those sorts of things, but it's hard to deny it when it's right there in front of your face, your longing and your loneliness. Eight _years._

"You made it," Ravi murmurs again, crouched over because of their height difference, pressing the words against the top of her head. Liv laughs a little, watery and sad, remembering how often Peyton used to joke about it - the tallest person she knew and the shortest, trying to meet halfway. "God, you look exhausted. How long have you been awake?"

"I don't need sleep, you know that," Liv says, finally tearing herself away, trying to wipe her cheeks before he sees. She fails, judging by the look on his face, when she finally makes eye contact.

"No, but it still helps. Come on." Ravi tugs her gently by the arm. "I've got food for you, and a room made up, but I'll need to do a blood test first."

"You don't trust me?" Liv jokes. She stumbles a little on the step, steadied by Ravi's hand on her elbow - maybe she is a little punchy.

"No, it's not that. I'll explain later," Ravi says, still frowning in concern. Inside the front door is a pretty normal-looking foyer, with a split staircase leading up to a second floor. Around the banister is a long hallway, at the end of which Liv can see a brightly-lit kitchen. There's music playing from within - Motown, of course. Liv finds herself tearing up again. "Just a safety precaution. You didn't bring anything?"

Liv just shrugs helplessly, unable and unwilling to explain that she doesn't really own anything anymore. Most of her stuff from before had been lost in the chaos of the Battle of Seattle, and the clothes and furniture she'd had on the island had been donated or stolen - she'd had very little attachment to any of it. Even the last token she'd had of Peyton's friendship - a scarf she'd given her once, some birthday or Christmas, Liv doesn't even remember anymore - had been lost a few years ago, during one of the unannounced "safety checks" the MPs regularly performed on the island. They showed up in the middle of the night, terrorized everybody, and took whatever they wanted - Liv had known at the time that it wasn't worth the risk of trying to get it back. "Didn't want to risk checking a bag. It was dicey enough getting through security."

"You wore a disguise, right?" Ravi asks, sounding worried. "The mugshots at the airport - "

"Yeah, I was clean. No problems." If they'd caught her, she'd know by now. They weren't subtle. "Do you have a lab, or - "

"Of course. But it's on the other side of the property. No, we can just - up here," Ravi says, leading her up the stairs. At the point where the stairs split into two directions is a sort of glass panel in the wall - an LED screen, some sort of security feature, Liv guesses, although she doesn't get a good look at it. Ravi takes her up the right hand staircase, still with one careful hand on her back, like he's afraid she'll fall over. "It's a bit of a weird layout, to be sure, but I didn't build this myself - just bought the house and the land as is. I've done some remodeling, but it's difficult to do anything big without proper contractors, as you can imagine, so it's slow going. Here." The stairs lead up to a long hallway, with a balcony that overlooks down to the foyer. Liv can see where the other staircase connects on the other side. "It's almost a hundred years old - well, the wall outside is newer, of course. The house was designed by some eccentric European in the 1930s, but the wall is mine. Here, I thought you might like this room."

"Wow." Liv blinks, still overwhelmed by all of it, feeling a little surreal, like she's dreaming. "You know, I was expecting something a little more Walking Dead. A compound in the mountains, an abandoned prison maybe - guard dogs, et cetera."

"I'm more of a cat person," Ravi says, pushing her down on the edge of a large bed. The room reminds Liv of a Bed and Breakfast she once stayed in - flowery wallpaper and everything. "Here, I only need a small sample. Roll up your sleeve." He's got a med kit already laid out on the nightstand, with a box of familiar blue gloves. Somehow, it's watching him pull them on - the familiar twist and snap - that jolts Liv out of her half-stupor.

"Not that this isn't very extra," Liv says, grinning a little as she shrugs out of her jacket, pushing up her sleeve. "The big wall, coded messages? You couldn't spring for a _moat?_"

"Now that's not a bad idea," Ravi says, teasing back. This close, she can see his face properly for the first time - his beard's out of control again, but she doesn't think he's really aged much. His face really does look very much the same. The white streak in his hair gives away the fact that he's on his 'time of the month,' but wouldn't he still have aged, in the other three weeks a month that he was human? Eight years isn't a long time, but it's still _eight years_. "The wall is more to keep out the rabbits. The first year or so I was here, I couldn't keep a single plant alive - they're terribly annoying."

"Really? Because I thought you were just an eccentric billionaire," Liv says.

"Well, that too," Ravi says, and ties off the tourniquet on her arm with a snap. Liv smirks, feeling a bit more on solid ground. "Did you tell anyone? About me, I mean?"

His tone is casual, but Liv knows better. "You know I didn't."

"Well, I didn't want to assume. You know I trust you, you could've had friends, allies." Ravi is careful and quick with the process, drawing a small sample of her blood into a vial, his hands as deft and gentle as she remembers them. They've done this a thousand times - a million, maybe, in this same exact position - Liv sitting on something, Ravi kneeling at her side, bickering back and forth to distract each other from the matter at hand. "You could've brought some of the children with you, even. That's what I was trying to tell you - all the remarks about the kids."

"Oh." Liv feels sort of stupid, now that he says that. "Shouldn't I be the one with kids, then? You always kept talking about _your_ kids."

"Yes, but specifically about how great _this place_ was for them," Ravi says. "You know - I couldn't just come out and say 'feel free to bring your undead adopted kids with you.'"

"Well yeah, but - okay fine," Liv says, laughing a little incredulously, "maybe you should've just sent more encrypted ones."

"I had to pay a friend of mine to do that," Ravi says archly. "He's not cheap, either. Encryption that fools the U.S. government isn't an easy thing to do - I'm good with computers, but I'm not that good. There, done." Ravi pulls the tourniquet loose and gently pushes her arm up, holding a small square of gauze at the injection site. "So?"

"So." Liv takes a deep breath. "I adopted most of them out. A few of them died." She says this through gritted teeth, trying hard not to think about little Nadine, who had gone feral during one of the brain shortages, and was shot by the MPs. Or Jackie, who went missing - just vanished without a trace one night. Vincent, taken in the night by CDC personnel after his blood tests came back irregular. "It was safer for them not to keep in touch. The ones who were adopted, I mean."

Ravi looks impossibly sad, putting his kit away slowly. "I'm sorry, Liv."

"Yeah, well." She shrugs. "Major could've helped me hang onto them. He had a lot of pull with the MPs, but." She laughs again, self-deprecatingly. "Have you heard from him?"

"He was in Belize, the last time he sent word, but that was several years ago." Ravi looks at her, serious and direct. "He's not in touch with you?"

Liv shakes her head. "The final break up was...pretty final."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. It was our own fault." Playing at happy families while the world burned down around them - yeah, they deserved it. Burying their heads in the sand until the heat got too much to take. "I hope he's still alive."

"Or un-alive, as the case may be," Ravi says. "I think he is. He's smart."

"What about Clive and Dale? Last I heard they were here with you."

"They were for a time, but they're in Germany now - Dale's father has an EU citizenship, did you know that? They get in touch every few months. They're fairly remote as well, though, so it's difficult." He reaches out and touches her arm again, careful and affectionate. "You should get some rest. You ate recently?"

"Yeah. This morning." The government-supplied grey matter gets the job done, but it's a mix of tissue from dead cadavers, and as such doesn't have even half the potency of an actual brain. No visions, thankfully, but it also doesn't last as long, or give her as much strength. "I should be okay for a week or so. You have something worked out here?"

"Yeah. Something." Ravi smiles, pushing her gently back onto the bed. "Sleep for awhile. We'll catch up more later."

"I'm not tired," Liv says stubbornly, even as her back and legs start singing with relief, at the touch of a comfortable bed. "It's just you, in the house?"

"Yes, right now it is," Ravi says. "Other than you."

"Right now, like there are other people who come and go? Or - "

Ravi cuts her off by dropping a pillow on top of her face. Liv sputters a little, pulling it away, her hair flying up from the static. "Later."

"You're so mysterious," Liv taunts, laughing a little as he saunters out of the room, flipping the light switch off as he goes. It's almost dusk outside, and the sunlight that filters through the heavy curtains looks tinted with orange. "Fine, I'll sleep, but I'm only being nice to you because I missed you. Are you happy?"

"Yes, because I missed you too," Ravi says, pausing slightly at the door. "I - yes. I missed you quite a lot, Liv. I'm glad you're here."

Liv smiles at him from the bed, rolling over on her side, her eyelids already drooping. She doesn't think she's ever felt this relieved. "Yeah. Me too."

"Yeah." Ravi shakes himself, as if remembering something, and turns away, shutting the door gently behind him. Liv is asleep before she even hears his footsteps fade away down the hall.

* * *

It's always been risky to stay in touch, but after Ravi was appointed the head of the CDC, it became almost impossible. Liv quickly got used to getting scraps of information through Peyton, who served as a functional go-between until she quit her job to run for Senate. It was one thing for a lawyer to send messages to an infamous, politically touchy zombie who had faked her own death, and a whole other thing for an elected member of Congress to do it.

Whatever happened between them, Liv doesn't know and doesn't want to know; Ravi had resigned not even a month after Peyton won her election, which was a fairly big hint that the split had been more political than personal. They're obviously not together now, or even still talking to each other - he seems shocked to hear that she's still in office.

"Still in Georgia, really?" He asks, over coffee the next morning. Liv had slept all through the night and awakened feeling better than she had in months - and Ravi's got _hot sauce_, which makes the coffee a real treat. A whole cupboard full of it - Liv had almost cried. "She never took to it. Always talked about moving back to the West coast."

Liv shrugs. "She seems happy. Married." She eyes him at that, but he doesn't react outwardly. "He's a lobbyist, I think. I'm surprised you didn't know - don't tell me you're not following politics anymore?"

"Well, yes, but only very specific parts, which really has done wonders for my mental state lately, I must say," Ravi says, "but her name hasn't exactly come up, and I didn't want to _torture_ myself by Googling her name or anything." He snorts. "She said she wanted to change things from within. I did try to warn her that it'd be harder than she thought."

"I guess you would know better than anyone," Liv says, not meaning it in any pointed way, but Ravi still sets his coffee cup down abruptly, his face twisting up sadly. "Stop, I didn't mean it like that. I know you did what you could - "

"You stop. I could've done more." His expression morphs into something angrier, darker. "Liv, I have so much to tell you - I don't even know where to start."

"Same here." The air between them is familiar and easy - as if they'd only been apart days instead of years. "I told you the big things last night. Major, the kids. You probably know the rest just from the news."

"I know a bit more than I'd like to," Ravi says. He reaches out and gently takes her wrist in his hand, turning it over so that her palm is open, laid flat against his. "I would've told you a lot of it, but I thought it would put you in more danger than you already were."

Liv stares for a moment at their hands, pressed together on the counter like they're swearing a vow. "Is this the part where you tell me why you needed a blood sample?"

"Yes. Well." Ravi squeezes her hand gently. "Why don't you start by telling me what you _do_ know about what the government's been doing, and we'll go from there. It might be easier that way."

A pit has opened up in the bottom of Liv's stomach. "Starting with what? The quarantine, the MPs, the bullshit CDC protocols? The disappearances, the travel restrictions, the propaganda - should I go on?"

"Start with the CDC," Ravi says calmly. "Just tell me what you know. Summarize it for me."

"This feels like a test," Liv grumbles, but at another gentle, urging squeeze from Ravi's hand, her shoulders slump. "And here I thought you invited me over to go jet skiing."

"Maybe after dinner," Ravi says.

* * *

So. The CDC, which under Ravi's tenure had been a somewhat humane voice of reason among the rising paranoia and panic that had suddenly gripped American society. Those few peaceful years after Major and Ravi's bait-and-switch with the cure had been nice, but nobody was surprised when it didn't last. Seattle was still Ground Zero, but there were smaller outbreaks in other major urban populations - the lure of being cured of terminal illness was a powerful one, and the quarantine wasn't all that strict for awhile. Chicago, Orlando, Mexico City, Vancouver. The borders between Mexico and Canada were closed after an incident involving a zombie who murdered his girlfriend while on vacation in Toronto, and the UN declared a global health emergency; isolated cases of zombieism began appearing in Europe and Southeast Asia, and dozens of countries started limiting travel to and from the United States. The zombies in question were "taken to a secure location," of course, after which the noose around Seattle's neck tightened.

What Liv knew was that suddenly, her little hippie commune-like isle of serenity started seeing an influx of people who weren't exactly passing through the vetting processes. Criminals, mostly - zombies from Blaine's operation, political radical types who wanted to exterminate humanity, rapists and murderers and drug runners. All the people who had been sort of shitty in life were also shitty in death - go figure. Major had kept it under control for a while - sending the really bad eggs back, threatening the rest into submission - but even he had to admit defeat eventually, especially without the resources and infrastructure of Fillmore-Graves behind him.

The thing was, zombies like that weren't supposed to be allowed on the island - it was part of the treaty with the government that had been worked out after the Battle of Seattle. The island was meant to be an oasis - a safe retreat for zombies who were peaceful, who'd been turned against their will, terminally ill patients who were turned as a last resort. Women and children - accountants, teachers, basketball coaches. You know. Normal people. It was the only clause that they'd really went to the wall fighting for.

* * *

"Ah, yes, because the U.S. government has a long and noble history of respecting treaties," Ravi says.

"Just let me finish, smart ass," Liv replies.

* * *

In the last year of Ravi's leadership, it got really bad. The donated brains became regulated. Their travel to and from the mainland became restricted to the point of ridiculousness. The CDC became less of a regulatory body and more of an aggressive agency - endowed with money from Congress, installed with a regulatory board staffed by politicians and rich doctors that Liv just knew Ravi probably wanted to toss out the window at every meeting. Then the MPs - military police - were installed on the island as a "safety precaution," because the public opinion had turned so harshly against zombies, it really had become dangerous for them to move around freely. All the sitcoms in the world didn't really do shit when people were watching news pieces about zombies murdering joggers and ripping open giraffe skulls in the middle of the day at petting zoos. (And yes, that really happened. Some undead pacifist in Chicago who refused to feed and went feral at the worst possible moment.)

And then people started disappearing - the good people, the innocent ones. The adopted parents first - and then the children. Most of the kids Liv and Major had been looking after had scattered to the wind by then, but Jackie was the last straw for Major, who couldn't bear to stay any longer.

He'd begged her to come with him. Go to ground, disappear. He made the same offer to a lot of folks on the island - the ones they knew and trusted - and some of them took him up on it, but not Liv. She couldn't leave - not when there was still a chance, not when Ravi was still the Director, with Peyton gearing up for a run at Washington. Not to mention that she still had Vincent and Nadine to worry about, so they fought about it and then she stayed, and no, she really doesn't want to talk about it.

* * *

"Fair enough," Ravi says. "Although for what it's worth, you definitely won me in the break up." He smiles dryly. "Try to contain your excitement."

"Um, you have hot sauce here," Liv says. "And you're a billionaire, remember? It's worth a lot."

"Aw, shucks," Ravi says.

* * *

Oh yeah - so, money. The other thing about the sudden influx of nondesirable undeads on Liv's zombie utopia was cash - the sudden appearance of a whole lot of it. A bunch of the new arrivals seemed to have income sources that never dried up - investments, trust funds, inheritances, that kind of thing. Liv smelled all kinds of rats, but what little digging she could do didn't turn up any conspiracies - from what she could tell, they were all telling the truth about it. This guy really did have a dead rich uncle, that guy really did make it big on the stock market. There was one girl - started dealing Utopium a few years in, Liv eventually got her arrested - who had won some seven figure settlement after getting run over by a delivery truck when she was nineteen. Apparently the guy had ran a red light and paralyzed her from the waist down - so from her perspective, the zombie thing was pretty convenient: lots of money _and_ she got her legs back.

The best she could tell - her educated guess - was that it was some sort of experiment. Someone at the CDC - because it had to be them, the MPs were too small, and Congress was too scattered and chaotic to pull off a good conspiracy like this - was running some kind of sick experiment, handpicking zombies to send to the island to observe behavior in a controlled environment. What kind of behavior they were looking for, Liv didn't know - response to stress? Personality changes? Some sort of sociological study on zombies in groups? Or maybe all of the above - maybe the scientists had finally wizened up and realized that the island was the perfect place to do whatever the hell they wanted - throw some shit in a pot and watch it boil. Liv wasn't sure she cared enough to know the details.

Whatever it was, she knew it was out of control when Ravi stepped down. She could always tell when his influence was at work - the grey matter shortage, for instance, stopped instantly after the incident with Nadine (wow, almost as if there really wasn't any shortage at all!) and for weeks afterward Ravi made a point to make as many public appearances as possible, a loud presence on the morning shows, getting his picture taken having lunch on the Hill. His resignation came after a string of demoralizing losses - Washington state passed the laws about the highway border controls, which Ravi had been campaigning openly against, and then after that came the new security protocols, which cut down the trips between the island and the mainland to practically nothing. Liv wasn't surprised when he made the announcement, even if it was a hard, devastating blow. Her fellow undeads had blamed him for all of it - but she knew the truth, she knew he'd been their last and best ally. It was a sick, sad day - the moment that comes when you know there's no turning back, that that light at the end of the tunnel was actually the glow of oncoming headlights.

Two days after his press conference, a law was passed allowing the CDC to take custody of zombie children without the informed consent of their parent or guardians, even if the parent or guardian in question was still a living human. It didn't get much press, but every zombie in the world knew what it meant. And if Liv had thought it was bad before - she really had _no_ idea.

* * *

"Yes, that was the main reason I resigned," Ravi confirms, even though Liv had sort of already known. "Not the only reason by far. But the last few months, I'd had some hope to prevent that from passing - it was only when they slipped it into the budget bill that I knew I had no chance. I didn't see any other way."

"You were trying to make a big PR splash," Liv guesses. "Resigning 'in protest' - that interview you did with Rachel Maddow - "

"I wasn't famous enough," Ravi says. "John Oliver's episode helped a little, maybe if I'd gotten an actual spot on his show I could've - "

"Oh, you had friends in Hollywood?" Liv makes a snooty face. "Look at you, Mr. Big Time - "

"He made a big donation to Peyton's campaign, and - oh, shut up," Ravi says. "They would've passed it no matter what I did. Let's be real."

"With Romney in office? Definitely," Liv says with a sigh. "You tried, though."

"Yes. I did. And I failed." Ravi gives a morose shrug. "Strap in, my friend. It gets worse."

* * *

What Liv didn't know was that she was half right, and half wrong. It wasn't an experiment, although the residents of Zombie Island _were_ being studied - something Ravi allowed, in exchange for what he thought at the time was bargaining power. Of course what _he_ didn't know is that he was also being handled - albeit much more delicately than the vulnerable population he was advocating for.

His appointment had been political - already rich as sin by then off the proceeds of the vaccine, the publicity surrounding the events in Seattle had positioned him as a powerful public voice, and he hadn't been shy about using it. It was good PR to put him at the head of it, at a time when sympathies were turned towards zombies - the general mood was more along the lines of "look at these lucky folks who get to live forever" and less "ohmigod monsters."

Of course that changed quickly. What it became, much faster than anyone had anticipated, was a numbers game. It was very easy for humans to be turned, and extremely hard to regulate - in the sense that the CDC really had very little functional control over a zombie's actions, especially when the CDC didn't know who was a zombie and who wasn't. Someone could be turned and not even know it - go home to their husband and infect him too, smear blood from a papercut onto a door handle and infect dozens of strangers at a Starbucks. It was hard to be certain of the true number of zombies walking around at any given time, especially since there were so many easy ways for them to pass as human, and the only true way to detect one was through a blood test, which was both legally tricky and expensive. At the time that Ravi left, the population was estimated to be reaching a statistical tipping point - a 'no return' number that meant that eventually, zombies would overtake humans in number, at some point in the future.

And hadn't _that_ been a fun briefing. Ravi had known this since the beginning, of course, from the very first day he'd looked up from his roast beef sandwich and realized that his new lab assistant was a little more interesting than your run of the mill goth mortuary student. His vaccine would help, but they couldn't innoculate _everybody_ \- it was a classic race against time. There were cases popping up in Europe and Asia, and dozens more in South America, and Ravi's vaccine was only effective in seven out of ten cases. Large population centers - it was straight out of day one of his infectious disease textbook. You can beat back a normal disease with a vaccine, even if it tips over into an epidemic, but this wasn't a normal disease, and it wasn't transmitted in any normal, controllable way. This was something that killed you, something that you could catch very, very easily, and then made you reliant on the healthy population to continue surviving. Resources were limited, in about every sense of the phrase.

And then, the even scarier numbers: how to feed them all. Inevitably there was violence; zombies outside the quarantine in Seattle didn't always have a convenient job to supply them with brain tissue, and there were plenty of deaths. Part of Ravi's job was to coordinate the cover-ups of these deaths - many of them were reported as animal attacks - which didn't sit well with him then and doesn't still now, although Peyton had always argued for the practicality of it, reminded him that a lot of the zombies in question had gone feral. Which was unfortunate, and tragic, and very sad, but couldn't be helped after the fact, and became a symptom of the root problem: how do you feed a growing population of thousands whose only method of survival is literal _cannibalism?_

The first attempt were animals, which Ravi tried to tell them wouldn't work. Many of the early disappearances were genuine accidents; the segment of the island population that were given grey matter from deer and sheep often became catatonic after eating it, and fell off of bridges or walked right into busy streets, et cetera. The personality transfer that Liv always struggled with back in her gumshoe days seemed much more potent when it came to animal brain - the zombie would take on the same level of brain activity as their food, turning them into the drooling monsters from the Romero movies - not a long term solution, to say the least.

There was a steady supply of donated brains; plenty of family members of zombies were willing to sign over their bodies in death, and there were black market supplies - unclaimed Jane and John Does - bodies of executed criminals - well, it got much more grim from there. After all, nobody ever claimed that the American government didn't know how to get its hands on pounds of flesh - Ravi's not sure if Liv really wants the details, because some of it still keeps him up at night -

* * *

"I don't," Liv says flatly.

Ravi grimaces sympathetically. "Wish _I_ didn't."

* * *

\- but it was by no means enough. Not with the way the zombie population was expanding - exponentially so, as enclaves of zombies started to pop up in other countries. Pandora's Box was well and truly open - and nobody really had a good solution.

Synthetic brain was the only real way forward, which is where Ravi focused the bulk of his efforts, knowing that his time at the CDC was running out, and that he'd have limited access to all the lovely, state of the art, classified lab equipment should he leave his post. But that was a gargantuan scientific problem all on its own; what Ravi was essentially trying to do was clone people - or clone body parts - which was a large order to say the least.

He'd thought he'd had the support of the administration, but the longer it went on, the more he started noticing things getting authorized without him: experiments he hadn't sanctioned, research he'd explicitly ordered to be stopped. Scientists he'd personally hired were moved to different departments, quietly transferred out until he had almost no allies left. The board of directors were endowed with more and more authority until Ravi felt more like a figurehead - which in retrospect was exactly what he was. Someone to go on television and smooth over PR crises while they kept on doing whatever they wanted. And then, Peyton decided to run for office. And Ravi knew his time was up.

* * *

"I just couldn't do it," Ravi says apologetically, like he thinks she's actually going to get mad at him, or something. "I couldn't stand behind her at the podium while all of this was happening. And while she was right in that the visibility would protect us - if I were even a _little _less famous, I mean...come on - "

"But you figured it out," Liv persisted. "Didn't you? Synthetic brain matter."

"I did," Ravi says, his obvious pride tempered by the seriousness of the conversation. "I did. But - "

"There's a catch," Liv says with a sigh.

"It limits your strength considerably," Ravi says. "And while it'll keep you alive, it has side effects that aren't particularly pleasant." He looks apologetic again. "It's easy for me to synthesize in my lab here, but I need fresh brain tissue each time. There's a man at one of the morgues in Auckland whose daughter is a zombie; he smuggles brain tissue to me as a favor, and I disseminate it to the few other zombies in the area - a sort of underground brain network, if you will. But that won't last forever, either."

"What kind of side effects?" Liv asks sharply. "And how much can you produce with one sample?"

"Weakness, persistent nausea, night terrors," Ravi lists. "Muscle deterioration. And it won't keep you fed for even half as long as actual human brain tissue." He sighs. "I'm working on it. Now that you're here you can help me - you've no idea how much I've missed having someone to bounce ideas off of."

Liv bites her lip, thinking. "You're so remotely located up here, I assume you've already considered the possibility of becoming a mortician again."

"Do you know what the death rate is in this county? Two bodies a year, is the average. There just aren't enough people." Ravi shakes his head. "We could go to Auckland if we had to, my friend could get me a job at the morgue - and we might have to, understand. But I chose this property because I was worried that…"

"All hell would break loose?" Liv asked dryly, looking around at the cozy, stocked kitchen. Every cupboard was stocked to its breaking point, and there were boxes of canned goods piled next to the cupboard. The water came from a well - she'd noticed it this morning, poking her head out of her bedroom window curiously - and if she knew Ravi at all, she'd bet money that the electricity came from a private generator, too. "This is your desert island house. Your apocalypse bunker."

"Essentially." Ravi regards her seriously over the coffee cups. "Right now our priority is supplies. Brain, to be exact. We need lots of it - preserved and protected."

"There are other zombies in the area?"

"Three that I know of. Although if there are others I think I would've met them by now." He scratches at his beard thoughtfully. "A friend of mine that I met at the CDC lives about five kilometers south of here with his younger sister and her family - he was the one who told me about this area in the first place, showed me the house when it was for sale. Property is so bloody expensive here, none of the locals could afford to buy this plot, and they were worried some billionaire prick would come along and snatch it up, build a helicopter pad or something. So I bought the land and the house, donated about half of it to the local wildlife preservation charity, and they seem to like me well enough. So far, anyway."

"Well, you're not a prick," Liv says with a smile, "but you are a billionaire. I guess they got half lucky."

"'Lucky' is subjective," Ravi says dryly.. "The bloke's name is Bill Kenworthy. He's done fine so far - responds much better to the synthetic matter than any other zombie who's tried it. The other one is a young woman by the name of Kaia, she's married to one of the cattle farmers down the highway. She was turned on holiday in Australia. She's a very nice - and very scared - young girl. Not even twenty-five - she hasn't told her husband." His shoulders slump. "There's no safe place, Liv. Not anymore. But this is the best I've come up with."

"It's a lot," Liv says, blinking back tears as she looks around again. The thick, heavy curtains - the wall. The long road, accessible only by foot or four-wheeler. The copse of trees that surrounds the house. It's a lot. "Better than the island."

Ravi doesn't say anything, simply reaching out for her hand. Liv takes it and just breathes, for a second, thinking.

"Tell me the rest," she says, after a moment, pulling the words up from deep within her throat.

"Alright," Ravi says gently.

* * *

Two weeks before his resignation, Ravi stumbled onto a file directory on the main server that contained years' worth of data that he'd never seen before; detailed medical records of several zombies who were then living on the island, none of them approved by Ravi himself - in fact, many of them he'd never heard of before, and had no idea that they were occupants. Many of them had military experience when they'd been alive, although none of them had been upstanding citizens, to say the least. Quite a few of them had worked for Fillmore-Graves. All of them men, who had died between the ages of thirty and forty, and all of them white. Quite a few of them had criminal records as well.

The directory disappeared off the server almost immediately after Ravi found it, and two hours after that he was called in for a meeting with two Pentagon officials who had installed themselves at the CDC offices in Atlanta, ostensibly under the guise that they were in command of the MPs who guarded the island. Ravi skipped that meeting - for obvious reasons - and hastily set up some very public television interviews, making an effort not to be caught at the office alone, or really away from a camera at any considerable period of time - not hard to do, considering how public he'd made himself, and Peyton's campaign. There was always a reporter around, back then.

Major had been in the wind by then, and Ravi wouldn't have dared to get in contact anyway - but it didn't matter, since Ravi already knew what his old friend would say: get out, and get out now. Take Peyton if you can, but either way, don't tell her anything. And take as much with you as you can carry.

Which is what Ravi did. He knew the child relocation law was going to pass - child _abduction_ law, more like - and he knew he had enough goodwill built up with the pundits and the talk show hosts that he could make his exit a bit of a splash - not a wave, maybe, like he would've liked, but some water was better than none. On his very last day, Ravi scraped together his courage and downloaded as much information as he could onto three hard drives, which he then shoved inside his jacket and carried out with him on what he told his secretary was a quick coffee run. Then he drove around Atlanta for the six hours or so he had to spare before his scheduled press conference, trying to count how many cars were tailing him. His final tally was three - but it was probably more. Ravi's no soldier.

The weeks afterward, he went straight from press conferences to television studios to airports - he slept in luxury hotels, paid extra for visible rooms, kept the PR people Peyton had loaned him - a parting breakup gift, if you will - close at all times. She'd thought he was paranoid, and she was probably right - but Ravi was carrying dozens of terabytes of classified information on his person, and _you_ try relaxing in a hot tub with that nuclear bomb tucked in _your_ suitcase. It's been eight years, and Ravi still hasn't lost the tension in his shoulders, not completely.

What he found on those hard drives wasn't surprising, though it would've been much more so only months earlier, when he was still under the impression that his job was what he thought it was. They were exploring military applications of zombies - of course, Ravi would've had to have been naive to think they hadn't at least considered it - sending handpicked candidates to the island and then tracking their behavior, watching how they reacted to different experimental compounds laced in the brain tissue they were fed. Hallucinogens, different types of drugs. Animal tissue mixed with human. And worse - zombie brain tissue. Harvested from those unlucky undeads that had been arrested.

Brain tissue from a zombie that'd gone feral made them go feral too - obviously. But tissue from a stable undead - one like Liv, Ravi had instantly thought with dawning horror, a zombie that was strong and healthy and fed regularly - made them even stronger. They weren't burdened with visions of the victim's life, like they were when they fed on humans - instead, it just made them more aggressive, in a general sense. There were statistical studies on the island that tracked this - the number of fights, robberies, assaults, and theft between residents almost _always_ spiked sharply after even a small amount of undead brain tissue was introduced into the island's food supply. Ravi had felt sick, and very, very stupid, reading all of this. Because he should've known. He should've _known._

* * *

"God," Liv gasps, cradling her head in her hands. "God. The disappearances - the _children _\- "

"Yes," Ravi says hoarsely. "I - yes."

Liv tries to breathe evenly through her mouth, fighting the growing nausea. Puking was never a hobby of hers, but zombies didn't have any digestive juice to puke up, so what usually came out was blood. It was one of the more horror-movie-type things about her existence that usually grossed out her friends, especially the ones with white countertops in their kitchens. "Did - did you find - "

"No names. Nothing damning enough that I could go public." Ravi reaches out tentatively, his hand hovering just close enough to her wrist that Liv can feel his body heat. Even as a half-zombie for five days out of the month, Ravi still feels like a furnace. Liv could always sense where he was because of it - that old familiar sensation from back in the day, standing in the lab and suddenly feeling warm all over, flushed from the neck down just because he'd walked into the room. "Most of the data was redacted heavily. I put the pieces together myself. I'm still not certain on most of the finer details." He shakes his head.

"They're - they want an _army?_" Liv lets her hands fall to the countertop, her coffee growing cold at her elbow. "Is that their plan? To train some undead special ops team they can send in when things get out of control?"

"Well, they certainly weren't interested in any humane, sustainable options," Ravi says dryly. "Look. They know what we know now: how zombies work, how strong they are, how easy it is to be turned. They've seen the writing on the wall, they know where we're headed. Maybe their worst case scenario involves some sort of...I don't know, zombie Navy SEAL team, but the more urgent problem is that eventually, we're going to run out of _food._" Ravi clenches one fist, leaning heavily against the counter on both elbows. "The way the population is growing, with the amount of accessible human brain tissue, we are simply going to _run out_ sooner or later. Our most optimistic models predicted zombies overtaking the human population in the U.S. by 2048 - and okay, fine, it's not like humans are going to stop making babies, but you and I both know that the world is going to look very, very different once that happens - once we even get _close_ to that happening! And who even knows what sort of government will be in power." He looks a little wild around the edges as he talks - reminds Liv of the kooky conspiracy theories he used to like to ramble about when they first met - mostly just for fun, he liked the ridiculous ones, like the faked moon landing and Roswell aliens - but every once in awhile Liv glimpsed the sort of unhinged air he'd get when he was serious, and understood why the CDC had fired him the first time around, all those years ago. "Maybe they were just testing it - seeing if it were possible. After all - better to chop up zombie bodies rather than human ones, right?"

"Better?" Liv says, almost choking on the word.

"You know what I mean," Ravi replies irritably. "Maybe they're preparing for the worst. Maybe they want to round us all up and set us loose until we rip each other apart, and then their problem's solved. I don't bloody know. But I know that's what they do with those children, Liv. That's where the government-supplied grey matter was coming from." Ravi looks as sick as Liv feels. "Nobody's going to miss a lot of those kids, after all. And the ones that do have family left behind - who's going to care about a missing zombie? Who would listen?"

"God," Liv says again, hearing her voice as if from far away, on the other side of a tunnel. Her head feels strange - disconnected from the rest of her body. "Why _kids?_ Why not - "

"I don't know," Ravi says gravely. "I don't. My best guess is that their brain tissue yields better results than an adult's, or perhaps some other practical reason, as far as freeze-drying it and disseminating it - look, I'm _sorry,_ Liv," he says desperately, leaning far over the counter and gripping her shoulder. "I'm sorry. I didn't have names, and I thought that yours - the children you were caring for - I'd thought they were still with you. I knew there were still children on the island, and - well, I hadn't heard anything from you in so long, and I assumed that if something had happened you would've reached out - "

"Jackie," Liv says thinly, "Vincent, and Nadine. Those were their names." She swallows thickly, trying not to think about it, but of course she is. She'd found herself feeling angrier, more aggressive too - had thought at the time that it was a symptom of cabin fever, and she'd always to go back to normal after one of her smuggling trips, so she hadn't put the pieces together. She'd eaten brain tissue from the city morgue, whenever she was in the city. On the island, she ate what everyone else ate. That was the difference.

_Who_ everyone else ate. Funny, how she'd stopped thinking of it as part of someone's body. But of course, that's what it had always been, what she's been doing for years - eating people. She thought of the freeze-dried brain she'd eaten, before she'd started the hike up here, and swallowed back bile.

"Of course," Ravi says gently, retreating carefully, but keeping one hand outstretched between them on the counter. "Jackie, Vincent, and Nadine."

"What was," Liv says, choking on the words, "did you find - in my blood - was there - "

"No," Ravi says, squeezing her hand again. "No. You're clean. Whatever brain tissue that was still in your system - it was human. You tested clear of drugs, as well."

Liv takes a deep breath, her shoulders loosening. She has to swallow several more times, before she can speak again. "So Peyton doesn't know anything."

"No. It would've been too dangerous for her - and we weren't on speaking terms at the end anyway." Ravi smiles sadly. "It's safer for her now. She's still human, after all - and the vaccine worked for her."

"And Major…" Liv trails off. "God. Remember when it was just you and me? Just you and me, and somewhere out there was Blaine - Patient Zero."

"As far as we know," Ravi says. "I still think it's possible that the boat party where you were turned wasn't the first incident. Max Rager had been in business for almost a decade by then, and Utopium's been on the streets since the late 90s."

"We'll never know for sure," Liv replies. She reaches out for his hand again, and Ravi gives her both - flattening her hand between both of his wide palms and squeezing tight. "I never should've turned Major."

"You had no choice."

"Yes I did. I had a choice," Liv says, hearing herself choke up, to her own horror. "I could've let him go. I probably _should've_ let him go. He told me as much - half a dozen different times. He was yelling it at me, by the end." She shuddered. "Every person Blaine turned - every single one who took it to cure themselves, thinking they'd live forever - they went out into the world and turned _more_ people, made it even worse. A snowball that just kept getting bigger and bigger. And then what did we do? Packed our suitcases and moved to a deserted island, and pretended like it would go away." She scoffed, shaking her head. "We were so stupid. An _island,_ for God's sake. We rounded ourselves up and handed over the keys."

"We're on an island right now, in case you've forgotten," Ravi says gently, squeezing her hand again. "Liv, I need you clear headed. We need to get ready."

"Right, yes. Yes." Liv slides her hand free, and pushes it through her hair, blinking back the tears. "If you have a connection at a morgue, we could smuggle enough up here, freeze-dry it, get a good stash going. How much do you have on hand right now?"

"About a year's worth," Ravi says, "though I'd feel better with more. As much as we can get." He frowns, tapping his knuckles against the counter. "We're both very visible, well-known - even down here. I'd feel better with some sort of job with access, where we could steal it ourselves, but - even with my friend's help, I wouldn't last very long at a government morgue before someone would recognize me."

"Funeral homes," Liv says, having had a lot of time to think about practical ways to get her hands on corpses. "Less visible. Less regulation. Easier to apply under fake names."

"A possibility, but it'd still have to be in a bigger city. And more chance for contamination of the tissue. Not to mention that a lot of families have the brains removed now, long before the body ever reaches a funeral home." Ravi frowns. "I don't like to spend much time in Auckland - it's the biggest city in the country, too many people from Europe and America live there. But Whangarei is too small, and Wellington and Christchurch are too far away." His frown deepens. "Flying's too risky. I don't want to leave New Zealand if we can help it - not at all, now that you've made it here. And spending too much time too far away from the house…"

Ravi's thinking worst case scenario - the 'we're all fucked, get ready for the apocalypse' scenario. Not that Liv hasn't been thinking that too, for some time now, but it takes her a second to catch up - to stamp down the instinct to say something reasonable, to make fun of him of overreacting. "There's hospitals too. Prison hospitals are easier."

Ravi blinks at her for a long second, looking faintly horrified. "I don't think I want to know how you know that," he says after a moment. "But - yes. Okay."

"Your zombie friends need to be onboard," Liv says seriously. "That girl you mentioned, who's been passing as human - I want to talk to her."

"Alright," Ravi says warily. "But she's quite young, Liv - do go easy."

"I'm totally easy!" Liv protests, then twitches at his laugh. "That came out wrong - you know what I mean."

"I do," Ravi says, looking at her fondly. He really hasn't aged a day, Liv thinks again. "But you can be quite intimidating when you want to be, my friend. Just saying."

"You were never afraid of me," Liv says, meaning it as a joke, but hearing it come out solemnly, like a truth she didn't know she was admitting.

"Well," Ravi says, grinning with one side of his mouth, "you never gave me a reason to be."

Liv's pretty sure that's a lie, but she's not about to call him on it. "Touche."

* * *

Liv takes a few days to settle in, unwind a little, at Ravi's insistence. She won't need to eat again for another couple of weeks, and since it's been so long since she's had real human brain tissue, she wants to ease into it anyway. It feels like years since she's had a proper brain vision - she's not sure how she'll react.

There's much more to the property than just the house and the yard; the wall runs the entire length of it, which is about twelve acres. Ravi's lab is about a kilometer away from the main house, hidden in a building made to look like an old garden shed - which makes sense, especially with other zombies around. But Liv is a little worried about having their food supply so far away from their living space.

"Don't you have a basement?" Liv asks. "Some place you could convert into a backup lab, in case we need to move the brain tissue here?"

"This is New Zealand, Liv," Ravi says, sounding amused. "Earthquakes, remember? No basements. But there's a room off the kitchen that I've got set up for that." He shoots her a narrow-eyed look from across the room. "You do know that I've been here almost five years now? Trust me, I've got backup plans for every backup plan."

Liv holds up both hands in apology, biting back a smile. "Sorry."

"I want to move them into several different places, eventually," Ravi says. "Freeze-drying the tissue means it doesn't need to be temperature-controlled, so theoretically we could have some stashed in every room in the house."

"And your friend Bill?" Liv asks. "And Kaia? Unless you're planning on expanding this place into a full-blown bunker, they'll need to get their places set up too."

"They're working on it," Ravi assures her. Liv's trying not to be nervous about the two strangers in the equation - she knows he can tell.

She doesn't have to wait too long to meet Bill, who comes crashing into the house the following day, with his four-year-old nephew clinging to his back. Broad-shouldered, with a pale white beard to match his zombie-fied mane of hair, he looks a little like Santa Claus. The kid - to Liv's surprise - is a zombie as well, which explains a few things.

"Ravi talks about you all the time," he says, shaking Liv's hand enthusiastically. His nephew, Thomas, is quiet but energetic, and spends most of the visit climbing all over Ravi's furniture, content to jump back and forth between the two couches in the living room while the grown ups talk. "And of course, I've heard of you, haven't I. Everyone's heard of Renegade."

Liv winces at the name. "Haven't done that in years. I prefer 'Liv.'"

"Of course, of course." To his credit, Ravi had made himself scarce, seeming to sense that Liv would want to assess Bill's character on her own. For his part, Bill seems aware of this too, sitting stiffly across from her as they talk, making a point to look her in the eye whenever he answers a question. "Still, it's hard not to listen to the stories. They're good stories." He's clearly nervous, although he makes an effort not to show it. "Ravi tells me you used to work together."

"Yeah." Liv doesn't go into further detail. "You worked with him too, I understand."

"In a sense." Bill scratches his beard, leaning his elbow on one knee. "I was trained as a medic during my military service, though I was already out by the time this all started happening. I was in the States when the Battle of Seattle broke out - my ex-wife is from New York, we were living there together when it happened. I was turned not long after - somebody on the subway nicked me in the arm." Bill holds out his bicep, pointing out the small, black scar that always marks the initial point of infection - when it comes from a cut or a wound, that is. It fades eventually, but Liv still remembers the sick feeling of someone touching it, in the first few years when it was fresh. "No clue who it was - didn't even notice until I got home. My wife left me not long after."

"I'm sorry," Liv says, startled into sympathy. Bill gives a lazy shrug.

"We had other problems, trust me," he says, with a wry smile. "Didn't quite know what to do after that - only got a visa because of the wife, and I was afraid of getting deported. I wanted to stay in the States - who knows why - so I applied for one of the initial trials at the CDC. They kept me on for almost six years - that's how I met Ravi."

"You - you were a _test subject?_" Liv asks.

"Yeah," Bill says casually, though he breaks eye contact for the first time - conspicuously so. He turns to look over at Thomas, who's now lying on his side on one of the couches, humming to himself and messing with the tassels on a throw pillow. "My nephew here, it happened to him about two years ago. There was an outbreak at his daycare - that's why I moved back. My sister was devastated." Bill pauses, blinking rapidly. "He should be almost six years old, by now."

Liv doesn't know what to say. It'd been hard enough with Jackie and Nadine, who were old enough to have _some_ sort of emotional maturity - enough that they could conceivably grow a little as people, as time went by, even though their bodies wouldn't age. But Vincent was only eight, and he would've been eight forever, if he hadn't been taken. "I'm sorry."

Bill shrugs again. "Better than losing him altogether, I reckon." He turns back to meet Liv's eyes. "You'll want to meet her, and her husband, I guess."

"Eventually." Liv tries for a smile, remembering Ravi's request that she go easy. "Ravi trusts you. And I trust Ravi."

"He's a good man," Bill says, in that quiet, intense way that men sometimes talk about each other. The same way that Major would sometimes refer to old comrades at Fillmore-Graves. "He got me out, as soon as it started to get bad."

"Yeah," Liv says, looking over at Thomas again, still humming quietly on the couch, kicking his sneakers against the cushions. He seems like a sweet kid. "It's a sort of habit of his. Showing up at the right moment and saving you from yourself."

"Not a bad habit to have, eh," Bill says admiringly.

Liv likes him. She likes Thomas too, who smiles at her shyly from behind Bill's legs, and then yells out loud and leaps into Ravi's arms as he joins them on the porch. Ravi grunts loudly, and grins wide enough to split his whole face in half, and carries Thomas upside down as he walks Bill to the gate, chatting pleasantly the whole way, his voice raised over Thomas' shrill laughter. Liv watches them from behind the pillars, smiling to herself, thinking, _maybe this could be good. Maybe this could be what I wanted in the first place._

Ravi is different now, in some ways, and very similar in others: he does still make her laugh, almost too much, to the point where Liv often forgets how grim the world is now and starts to feel a little - dare she say it - optimistic. His sense of humor is a little dirtier than it used to be, though - a little rougher, a little more bitter in places, which Liv can understand. He hates talking about American politics - probably because of Peyton, no doubt - and has odd blank spots in his knowledge that Liv tries to fill in tentatively.

But in every other sense, he seems quieter. Much more somber. Liv spends the first few weeks carefully exploring the new sharp edges of his personality - misstepping here and there, saying things that often make him wince, or pull back from her with wide eyes, looking horrified and sad. When she talks about the kids - her kids - that's when he does it the most. But she refuses to stop talking about them at all.

"I wish I could've met them, gotten to know them," Ravi says one night, as they share some sriracha-spiked coffee on the porch. It's deep summer here, with temperatures high enough to be dangerous at midday, but at night it's perfectly mild, with a breeze that ruffles the trees constantly, like a soundtrack beneath their conversation. "Of course I met Jackie that one time. But it was hardly long enough to get to know her."

"She was so nervous to meet you," Liv confides. There's an ache deep in her chest whenever she talks about them now, but the pain feels good, in a way. Like she's doing a good thing, by feeling it. Respecting them, somehow. "Major and I talked about you all the time."

Ravi ducks his head, smiling wanly down at his knees. The white streak in his hair looks grey in the dim light. It's how Liv used to picture him as an older man - distinguished grey in his beard, wrinkles around his eyes. "So did Peyton and I. About the both of you."

"We wasted so much time," Liv says idly, reaching out to gently touch his hair, brushing the white back from his eyes. His head lifts at her touch, but he doesn't move away, waiting patiently until she withdraws her hand. "Ravi. I've been here a month, and your hair's been white the whole time."

"Yes." He takes a long drink from his mug, draining the last bit of it. "Yes, that...is a recent development."

There's a pit of something, maybe dread, in her stomach. "The vaccine isn't - "

"It is effective now," Ravi interrupts, before she can finish. "The improved version, the one on the market. The _beta_ version I tested back in Seattle had...a few flaws." He shrugs. "I'm still human, for the most part. It's just that my, ah, _flare ups_ \- they keep lasting longer and longer."

Liv wraps her trembling hands around her mug. "And how long has this one lasted?"

"About a year." Liv closes her eyes quickly, turning her head away, and hears him laugh a little, quiet in the darkness. "Oh, come on. It's not your fault."

"Don't say that. Just - stop saying that, please," Liv says thinly, wiping her face quickly and gathering her courage to open her eyes. Ravi's smiling at her kindly, when she finally looks back again. "I know it's true, but just - stop saying it. Okay?"

"Alright," Ravi says, and carefully sets his mug down on the step between them. "If it doesn't help, then I won't say it anymore. What can I say that would?"

"I don't know," Liv says, with a frustrated laugh. "If I knew that then maybe Major and I would've made it." She shakes her head sadly. "What makes you say that you're still human? I thought your flare ups made you a full-fledged zombie."

"Well," Ravi says, folding his hands between his knees. "I can still eat real food, for one. But I can eat brain tissue as well, though I don't know if I'll go feral without it - obviously I haven't tested _that._ But I can still taste things, and I have a pulse." He holds out his wrist, and Liv wraps her hand loosely around it, not needing to press that hard against the pulse point to feel the blood pumping beneath his skin. "But I have the strength and speed, and everything. I think this is what the CDC was trying to replicate, with their experiments - the best of both worlds. They had my medical records, and I'm sure they were taking samples - observations, video, what have you - they had access to everything about me, when I worked there, after all. Who knows what sort of data they collected."

"Was this happening while you were still working there?" Liv asks, alarmed. "Do they know that the original version of the vaccine can do this?"

"No. The flare ups didn't start getting longer until about three years ago." Ravi pulls his hand back loosely, but Liv hangs onto it, sliding down until they're holding hands properly. Ravi smiles a bit, using his grip on her to pull her closer, pressing their folded hands against his knee. "I was already living here, by then. You see now, why I'm so hesitant to show my face too often in Auckland."

"They use CCTV here," Liv says quietly. "First thing I noticed, when I got off the plane."

"The government here is fairly liberal, and the population is small enough that the US government probably isn't watching all that closely," Ravi acknowledges. "Still. We don't know for sure."

"Right." Liv leans her forehead against his shoulder, a little weirded out by the concept of Ravi being stuck halfway in-between - just his body heat alone is a giveaway that he's not completely dead. At least not yet. She should've asked him about it sooner. "I'm gonna go down and introduce myself to Kaia tomorrow, I think."

"Alright."

"And I think Bill should be the one to apply at a hospital," Liv says. "I talked to him about it when he was here. He seems willing."

"I was...hesitant to ask him, but of course you're right, it's safer," Ravi says. "Feels selfish to let other people do all the work while we hide away up here, though."

"Who said we'd be hiding?" Liv says, lifting her head. "Of the two of us, who's spent the last decade or so roughing it on an island with government funding? We've got work to do, Rav. I've got _ideas._"

"I'm loving this new industrial side of your personality," Ravi says, with a little grin. "To think, you once gave me fifty dollars to put together your kitchen cabinets for you."

"That was different," Liv says, leaning her chin against the pointy edge of his shoulder, pouting a little. "They forgot to put the directions in the box."

"They had very clearly labeled parts, Liv. The door, the handles, the cabinet - that was it! The most complicated part was making sure it wasn't nailed to the wall upside down."

"Good thing we've both grown as people, then."

"I guess," Ravi says skeptically.

* * *

Liv's plans to spring herself on Kaia are derailed when the water heater goes down the following morning, apparently a common occurrence. She endures an hour or so of listening to him fuss around with it before rolling her eyes and stomping out to the backyard to help.

"You know," Ravi says, "I was actually kidding about you being industrial."

"All that island living," Liv says, "you pick up a few things. Besides, we used solar water heaters too - Fillmore-Graves wanted the island to be self-sufficient, remember? But I've never seen one like this before. It's the goofiest-looking thing."

"Hey," Ravi says stridently.

"Let me guess," Liv says with a smirk, "you designed it yourself."

"Passive systems don't rely on electricity, and while that'll be nice while it lasts I don't think we should count on it being accessible forever," Ravi says. "I was trying to come up with an approximation of a thermo-siphon system, but more efficient, but as you can see I've been having some trouble - "

"No kidding," Liv says, squinting at the heater, which looks more like a background set piece from a Star Trek show than a basic necessity of a house. "You've checked the tank for leaks?"

"Of _course._"

She wrinkles her nose. "You've got some kind of...battery attached."

"It's a solar generator! The idea was that it would speed up the time it took to heat the water...look, I'm not an engineer," Ravi says defensively, crossing his arms. "I built this myself, you know, and you haven't even told me you're impressed yet."

"I'm impressed," Liv says obligingly, biting her lip against a smile. "I also think that a regular old thermo-siphon heater would work just fine. There's no need to get fancy, Ravi."

"You always were a terribly conventional scientist," Ravi says, shaking his head in dismay, and Liv loses the fight against her smile. "All black and white by the book, no innovation or creativity at all."

"Which is why _you're_ the billionaire with a broken furnace, and _I'm_ just  
the dead girl who's helping you fix it," Liv says. "Consider this, my friend: if you design something new and it breaks, where are we gonna get replacement parts?"

"And where will we get replacement parts for a regular piece of equipment once the world ends?" Ravi folds his arms, looking smug.

"All the more reason to use a simple design, that we could replace with cannibalized equipment," Liv argues.

"Poor choice of words there," Ravi says with a snort.

"Shut up. We're replacing this," Liv says, elbowing him out of the way. "You've been vetoed."

"Oh, fine," Ravi says, stomping a little as he retreats, as if Liv can't see the smile lurking in the corner of his mouth. Liv will think of this as her first victory point.

The friendly battles over the next few weeks are varied and numerous: they bicker over digging a cellar to preserve extra supplies, whether to reinforce the windows with steel or simply build shutters they can take off whenever they want, how to procure clothing, whether to get some chickens, and which bedroom Liv should take - she's partial to the one he'd given her on the first night - it's pretty cozy, once she replaces the lace curtains with blackout ones - but he's got some Prince Charming complex about it and wants her to have the master, which is way too big. They finally come to a compromise where she keeps the room but also gets the one next to it, which she promptly turns into a storage room for all the crap that might be useful someday but they don't know what to do with in the meantime, which Ravi is disgruntled but resigned to.

It's fun. In a grim sort of way, anyway. Ravi's gone a little kooky, in the years they've been apart: this becomes obvious fairly quickly. He's definitely paranoid - though he has reason to be - but there are edges to his reasoning that sometimes border on nonsensical. Liv goes over his notes in her free time, and she can literally see the regression of his thinking, which is just fucking terrifying (to say the least). The science is still solid, but the water heater is just one example - he makes strange leaps of logic, and a lot of his ideas are haphazard and based on assumptions - or in some cases, wild guesses. He's got tons of little projects half-built and abandoned around the house that have a distinct air of "mad scientist" to them - generators and heat sources of his own design that Liv can't really see the scientific basis of - an engine meant to run on water that looks like another Star Trek idea - even strange contraptions that she's pretty sure are meant to be gun-like weapons, but he's cagey as hell about it when she asks. Liv gets a sick feeling, deep in her gut, whenever she comes across a new one.

She'd never call him on it. He's still one of the most brilliant scientists in the world - maybe the most brilliant, in context, considering what he's managed to accomplish under the pressure he was subjected to - but still, Liv isn't sure how she's going to be able to help. She was trained as an ER doctor, not a research scientist - she took a couple semesters of genetics in med school, and that's about it as far as her knowledge base goes. And even that was focused more on genetic diseases than the pure science stuff that Ravi is dealing with.

He's also got the shakes. It takes her a couple weeks to notice - he's pretty good at hiding it - but late at night, when he's tired or they haven't eaten anything in a few days - his hands develop a fairly violent tremor that only seems to subside after some sleep and fresh brain.

He clearly doesn't want to talk about it. "I'm fine," he tells her, when he catches her looking for the fourth or fifth time. "Just tired. Don't worry."

"Yeah. Okay," Liv says, trying to keep the skepticism out of her voice. "You should have the rest of this brain sample. I'm not hungry anymore."

"Liv," Ravi says, rolling his eyes, "I'm _fine_ \- "

"And I said 'okay,'" Liv says, putting on the stern face she used to use with the kids, in the rare moments when they needed to be disciplined. "Just eat it, Ravi. I'm not trying to say anything."

He's stiff and grumpy for the rest of the night, but he eats it, and at least his hands stop shaking. Another victory point for Liv.

Liv goes to bed every night feeling accomplished, but also very, very scared; there's an endless list of things they could have overlooked, dozens of dangers that might be headed their way that they couldn't possibly prepare for. Ravi being sick, somehow - whether because of the vaccine or some other reason - is Liv's current obsessive nightmare. Sometimes she thinks - it's just that he's been alone for so long, right? On his own? Traumatized by whatever it was that went on in Atlanta - she's sure he was censoring the worst parts for her sake - lonely and isolated up here, living with constant stress and fear? Of course he didn't know that Peyton was still in office - he was trying not to lose his mind, quite obviously, he wouldn't have wanted to subject his thoughts to _more_ possibilities for stress. But then again - Liv truly can't tell.

Still, the days pass faster than she'd ever thought they could, and Liv's cheeks sometimes hurt from smiling. The garden is Ravi's priority project, and it's pretty robust already: he's got potatoes and onions and pumpkins, which seem to need very little attention or help to grow. Apparently he's been trying to plant broccoli for a couple years now, but it keeps dying - but this year's bunch of plants seem to be hanging on just fine. They've got their fingers crossed.

A greenhouse would be nice, but Ravi wants to save that project for later - as mild as winter is in this region, it will still get cold enough to kill delicate plants - and Liv finally convinces him to come around on the cellar idea instead, which is easy enough to do, if not a bit labor-intensive. Bill's sister, Hattie, comes over to help them find a good patch of ground for it. The main problem is that there really are a lot of trees on the property.

"A hill, with no big trees around, is what you need," says Hattie, who is no-nonsense and gruff in a way that Liv really likes. She's got at least four inches on Bill, and is nearly as tall as Ravi, which is really saying something, and a wide, friendly face, creased with laugh lines. "The further from any structures, the better. And you'll need to use wood for the beams, not metal, so all that scrap Ravi's got in his shed won't work."

"I'm not sure we're going to find a hill without trees on it," Liv says. "Why a hill? Can't we just dig straight down?"

"Well yeah, 'course you could, a hill is just best because you can use the natural slope of the land for drainage," Hattie says. "But a pit style would work just fine. Just some extra steps involved, is all."

"I need to see it," Liv demands. "Can you draw it? Or would there be blueprints of what you're talking about online, or something?"

Hattie laughs. "Visual learner?" she says, gripping Liv's elbow as they step carefully over a fallen, rotting trunk. It's a motherly sort of gesture that makes Liv smile softly to herself. "I can do you one better - my husband's brother has a pit cellar on his property. You can come take a look if you like. We didn't build it ourselves - pretty sure it was there when they bought the place, although that means it's been around for a few decades at least, so the design has got to be solid, if nothing else."

"Your brother-in-law," Liv says cautiously, "does he know about - "

"Bill and Thomas? No," Hattie says, shaking her head. "He's - he can tell something's changed, though. Only a matter of time, I reckon."

Liv is quiet for a moment, debating how much to say. "If you don't mind me saying," she settles on finally, "that window of time is much shorter than you think it will be. Before they figure it out, I mean." Liv swallows thickly. "That, I know from experience."

"Suppose you're right." They come to a gentle stop, at a clear piece of land about fifty yards back from Ravi's lab building, which is itself another fifty from the main house. Liv can only barely see it through the trees. "This would work, I think. You could hide the entrance pretty easily, and if anyone...broke into your house, they'd have no idea it was here."

The fact that both Bill and Hattie have shown signs of thinking along the same lines as Ravi is...a good sign, Liv thinks. Or a really bad sign, depending on how you look at it. "How big do you think we could build it?"

Hattie's face changes a little. "I mean...pretty big. I've seen cellars that double as shelters. My first husband was from Queensland - that's Australia," she adds, tilting her head at Liv, "they get tornadoes there. His parents had a shelter in their backyard."

"It would take longer," Liv says, "but...it doesn't need to be fancy. And if we could hide it…"

"Could be useful, for a few different reasons," Hattie says neutrally, but her eyes still rest upon Liv's face, alert and a little wary. "You're an old friend of Ravi's. He talks about you a lot."

"So I've heard." Liv meets her gaze directly. "His friends are my friends, Hattie. If that's what you're wondering."

"Okay." She shrugs. "But friends are friends, and Ravi's something different, isn't he? To you, anyway."

Liv bites back an incredulous laugh. "If you're asking if we're involved, I don't really see how that's any of your - "

"No. I'm saying," Hattie reaches out and grips Liv's arm again, "it's _different._ Don't much care what goes on in your bedroom, mate. I'm asking you how much that's going to matter to you, when the chips are down and the police are at our door." Her eyes are dark brown, wide and serious in her face. "You're building this for two people, which is understandable. My family ain't your responsibility - but my brother, he's doing a lot for you two. Putting his safety at risk, isn't he, applying at the hospital." Hattie releases her, still looking gravely stern, but not angry. Not yet, anyway. "Ravi saved his life, and Bill feels like there's a debt owed, there. And I know Ravi would help us, he's done a lot for us already. But you? You don't know us. That's all I'm saying."

Liv bites her lip, looking down at the forest floor to buy herself some time, thinking carefully about her reply. Hattie seems patient enough to wait, taking a step back of her own, allowing Liv some more space. "I - Hattie, did Ravi tell you I had kids? Not kids of my own. But kids I was caring for."

"He mentioned it...briefly."

"Three. More than that, really, but I managed to find the others homes - real parents, you know." Liv shrugs ruefully. "Not that I wasn't a real parent - at least, I'd like to think I was. But that didn't matter in the end." Mentioning Major's role seems like a mistake, somehow, to this woman who clearly cares about Ravi. What that means - Liv will think about later. "They're all gone now. Taken, or...gone. I tried to protect them, but in the end I couldn't. It just wasn't enough."

"I'm sorry," Hattie says soberly.

Liv shrugs again. "I hear what you're saying," she says, "and...obviously I can't promise anything. I can't tell you how I'd react, if things got really bad - just like you couldn't promise me anything either." Liv takes a deep breath she doesn't need, and looks her in the eye. "But I can promise you that if I can help, I will, and I will _definitely_ never betray you. I used to smuggle people in and out of Washington, Hattie. I'm not saying you should trust me right away, but you can at least trust that I'm not lying. I hope."

Hattie nods shortly, looking up over Liv's head, at the cloudy sky that spills over the treeline. This late in the morning, it's already starting to get hot enough to be a little uncomfortable. "What were their names? Your kids."

"Vincent," Liv says, the words familiar by now. She'd gone a long time not saying them out loud, especially after they were all gone, and there was nobody left on the island who'd known them. But she's started talking about them again, now, and it feels...good. "And my girls were named Nadine and Jackie."

"They'll be in my prayers tonight," Hattie says, nodding again. She reaches out and grips Liv's bicep again, bracingly so. "Thanks."

"Of course," Liv says, and follows her back to the house, with a lightheaded feeling of relief not unlike what it felt to walk out of a shitty final exam in med school. At least she's pretty sure she passed this one.

* * *

Things start coming together. Bill gets a job at the prison hospital as a morgue attendant, which is a nervous bit of good fortune - everyone's still worried that it'll be obvious, that even though Bill's dyed his hair and everything that the world is now too paranoid to let him get away with it for too long. But all they can do is try.

Liv starts making the rounds of the whole county; through Hattie, she meets almost everybody. Her brother-in-law is friendly, and a bit more clued in than Hattie seems to realize (he even slips up once and calls Liv by her real name, instead of "Olivia," the half-alias she's been using, proving that he recognizes her) but he seems trustworthy enough. He also has plenty of spare lumber he's willing to give away.

"Friend of Hattie's?" He shrugs. "Friend of mine. You'd be doing me a favor, really - no room for it." Liv gives him a nod and a smile.

There are six or seven other families that Liv is introduced to, most of them farmers or cattle ranchers, though there's an older man who teaches at the high school who jogs after Liv when he spots her walking out of the gas station in town. He introduces himself as Peter, he's got a Australian accent, and clumsily tries to tell her that he'd like to help anyway he can.

"Everybody knows you're here, I hope you know," he tells her, half-apologetically, but with an air of smugness that a lot of Australian men have, in Liv's experience. "We all know Bill and Ravi. Just thought I'd give you a heads up, let you know that you're among friends."

"Friends, huh?" It's a foreign concept these days, but one that Liv is cautiously getting used to again. "Are you a...sympathetic friend, or a friend with some experience?"

Peter shrugs, smiling lopsidedly. "The former, with a bit of the latter, a few times removed," he says. "My, erm, roommate back in Brisbane. But either way - it's the right thing to do, isn't it."

"Isn't it," Liv repeats, smiling cautiously. "Alright. Nice to meet you, Peter."

"Back at you, _Olivia,_" Peter says, with the sardonic twist of someone who knows it's a lie. "Been wanting to meet you. I've done a bit of computer work for Ravi, on the side - security things, mostly. Beefing up his...communication."

The clue drops, after a split second of confusion - the encrypted emails. "Oh," Liv says, her shoulders loosening a little. Ravi hadn't mentioned him by name, just that it was someone local, but it makes sense. "Oh, right. Thanks, for that."

He shrugs. "Ravi's a nice bloke. We get on well." He pauses. "I live right off the highway," he continues. "Just...I have space. In my house. Just thought you should know." He shrugs, speaking the last part of the sentence quickly, nervous again.

"That's good to know, Peter," Liv says evenly. "So do we. But I bet you already knew that."

"Yeah. Lots of folks are making space nowadays." He grins, and Liv finds herself charmed - even more endearing is the business card he makes her take as she leaves. It's kind of cute - a high school teacher with a business card. It's got his address, phone number, and a title that says: _Secondary School Instructor: English Language_ on it.

She finally makes her way to Kaia, just as the weeks are starting to creep into autumn; Liv's been trying to catch her at home for awhile now, but the young girl always seems to be out. Liv's met her husband, though - she's not impressed.

"Sorry, been back and forth between here and Auckland - my mum's down there," Kaia says, sweeping Liv into her tiny living room with one hand. "She's moving up here, to be closer to me. So I've been helping her pack."

"You've been in Auckland?" Liv asks, trying to keep the alarm out of her voice. "Have you - "

"I drive down at night," Kaia interrupts, "wear things, different things, to disguise myself, when I go out in the day. Ravi told me to." She seems nervous, fidgeting with her hands, though Ravi had warned her that she was skittish. More scared than the others. And it also might just be part of her personality. "You know - big hats, scarves around my face. Sometimes I put on false lashes and things, to make my face look different. Was that right?" She bites her lip.

"Yes," Liv says, forcing her expression to look pleasant, friendly. "Yes, I'm sure you're fine. Don't you want to sit?"

"Oh." Kaia sits down abruptly, across from Liv in an armchair. "Right. Sorry."

_One of those,_ Liv thinks mournfully. She never could stand those girls who apologized all the time. "It's nice to finally meet you. I assume George mentioned me stopping by."

"Sorry about him," Kaia says, brushing her thin white hair away from her face. The little farmhouse she shares with her husband smells faintly of alcohol, as if someone's left an open bottle of wine lying around - but it's clean and neat, and the pictures on the walls are quaint - little acrylic paintings of ocean scenes and farmhouses. Liv can see the kitchen, too, through the open door and that seems just as well tended to as the living room. "He's ah, a bit skeptical of all of this. I told him a couple weeks back - he didn't believe me." For the first time, Kaia's expression fades out of nervousness and into something more bitter. "Even showed him the...stuff that Ravi gives me, the, you know. Food. He still thought it was a trick."

"Kaia," Liv says seriously, leaning in with her elbows on her knees. "You're going to need his support, if you're planning on staying here long term. If he thinks it's a trick then he doesn't really understand the reality of the situation yet, and that could become dangerous for you later on down the road." And for us, Liv doesn't say. All of us.

"I've been talking to him about it," Kaia says, still apologetic somehow. Liv isn't sure _she_ understands the situation either. "My mum understands - she was in Christchurch, when the outbreak happened there. That's where her family's from. She was the first one I called when this - when it happened. She'll help." She looks at Liv eagerly. "She's a gardener - not professionally, or anything, but she's been doing it her whole life. She knows heaps about plants and trees and things."

"That's great," Liv says, smiling. "But Kaia, George is - "

"I'll talk to him. I will," Kaia interrupts, fidgeting with her hands again. "He's...well, he's a bit traditional. But I'll talk to him."

"Okay." Liv retreats, not wanting to scare her off too badly. "Okay. Let me know if you need help." Kaia nods, and quickly changes the subject. Liv feels uneasy about it for awhile.

"Well, I always knew she was a question mark," Ravi says. "That's why I've never had her up to the house. She doesn't know where it is, and I don't think Bill or Hattie would've told her."

"Has anyone else been here?" Liv asks. "Peter, or that couple you watch movies with, what were their names again - "

"Oliver and Rui," Ravi supplies. "No. Bill and Hattie and Thomas, and that's it. Hattie's husband has never even been here."

Liv lets out a small breath of relief. "You've got quite the reputation in town, you know. Everyone I talked to already knew who you were."

"It's because I'm so devastatingly handsome," Ravi says, without skipping a beat. "It's a small town, you know. Fresh blood. I've had to beat the ladies off with a stick."

"Some of the gentlemen too, I imagine," Liv teases. Ravi flicks some soapy dishwater at her and quickly changes the subject.

In reality, Ravi's reputation is much closer to Frankenstein's than Don Juan's - the mad doctor who lives up on the hill. For what it's worth, most of the locals seem to think of him affectionately, and almost everyone certainly knows who he is - a few of them seem to even approve of his presence, in the way that Peter had, because rural as this place might be, it doesn't mean that nobody watches the news. Ravi is probably the only person in all of New Zealand that hasn't been keeping up with politics.

It kind of suits him. Liv watches him carefully, as they settle into a routine - as much of one as they can have, considering how erratic Ravi's behavior continues to be. Some days he's cheerful, almost manic, bouncing around the house, singing under his breath, muttering out loud while he bangs around with one of his projects. Other days he barely leaves his room - and sometimes, Liv doesn't seem him for days at a time - she only knows he's awake because she can the floorboards creaking above her head.

It's the synthetic brain - it has to be. Her theory is confirmed when she starts keeping a log - a sort of journal of observations, and noting which days he eats the synthetic tissue, and the changes in his behavior after she convinces him to eat some of the real stuff instead. The first few days after eating the synthetic are always the worst - Ravi's mood swings can be seen from _space._ He snaps at her one second, then seems almost tearfully apologetic the next. He works at a feverish pace, but gets almost nothing done. The most nonsensical of his ideas always come out in those days - when he's pouring over blueprints or a laptop screen of test results, muttering to himself, writing incoherent notes on a legal pad. He reminds Liv of the drug addicts that she used to treat, all the way back in her ER days, the young kids who would sit in the waiting room with a busted lip or twisted arm, high out of their skulls and not really all that injured, but hanging around anyway because it was warm. Liv and the other medical students would always push them to the back of the line so they could stay as long as possible.

The vaccine probably exacerbates it - he's not a normal zombie, and if he's permanently caught in this half dead, half alive state, then who knows how he'll react long term. If he keeps eating the synthetic, it'll keep him alive, maybe, but what about mental effects? They could be permanent - Liv has no way of knowing. But she doesn't know what's going to happen either way - even if he has the best brain tissue available, all the time, there's still a chance that he'll start to react differently to it. He can still eat normal food, after all, and he's got a pulse. Liv doesn't know _what_ he is, really.

"I'm fairly certain I can survive on real food," Ravi tells her, one night as they sit up together, watching the moon rise. These nights on the porch have become a habit - especially when Ravi is having a good day, when the synthetic has worn off, or he's eaten real brain. "I don't feel hungry without it. I just haven't been brave enough to test it."

"Well, we'll have to live with that mystery," Liv says firmly. "No way are we risking you going feral."

"We might not have a choice," Ravi says. The supply of brain tissue from Bill's job hasn't been as steady or plentiful as they'd hoped. Many families request that the brain tissue be removed immediately, to protect their loved ones' remains from people just like Bill. Ravi's friend at the morgue had gone dark weeks earlier, too - they were hoping for the best, but feared the worst, on that front. And neither of them have come up with another plan yet. "There's always the black market. But that comes with its own risks."

Murder victims, Liv knows, with grim certainty. People who sell brains for money aren't exactly wasting time on moral questions. "The government supplies grey matter here, too. One of us could register - we could at least try it. You don't think New Zealand is doing the same thing the U.S. is, do you?"

"No. But it would mean a lot more scrutiny." He squints at her. "You don't have a visa, I would remind you."

"I could get one."

"And announce to the world that you're here?"

Liv throws her hands up in frustration. "Like they don't already?! Ravi, I was careful, but I'm not a _spy._ I'm sure they've figured it out by now, even if they don't know our _exact_ location."

"Well, there's no need to send them a bloody invitation, either," Ravi replies. He sighs irritably, reaching out to pull her closer, wrapping his long arm around her shoulders. Liv goes without protest, grumbling her way into his embrace. "We'll build up our supply here best we can, then we'll go into one of the cities. Not Auckland - Wellington, maybe. And _I'll_ register," he says, squeezing her shoulders before she can say anything else. "They already know about me, after all. But if we can make it work down there, all the better - leave this place as our last resort."

"You trust the people up here not to ransack it?" Liv asks. "Kaia's nervous. Her husband's going to be a problem, and Hattie would do anything to protect Thomas."

"We won't put the brain anywhere they'd be able to find," Ravi says, reassuringly. "All Hattie will find in your cellar is human food, and she'd be welcome to that. I have my own hiding places for the brain."

And it's true - he does. Clever spots all over the house - beneath floorboards, above ceiling tiles. A hidden cupboard behind the fridge. False books on the bookshelf. They've been filling up little pockets for weeks.

"What will I do, in Wellington?" Liv asks. "My IDs won't hold up under much scrutiny."

"Temp work's easy enough to find." Ravi leans down, pressing his bearded cheek against the top of her forehead, and Liv closes her eyes, feeling cradled by the warmth of his body. It's been so long since she was this close to someone that still had blood running through their veins. So long since she was this close to...anyone, really. "You'll like Welly. It's a nice city - lots of culture, young people. I spent some time there when I first moved here."

"I'm not young anymore," Liv says tiredly.

"You look young."

"Because I'm dead." Liv cranes her neck up, pulling slightly away so she can look up at his face. "Evan's married. Did you know?"

"I keep track of him, yes. Him and his husband and your mother, as well." Ravi squeezes her shoulder again. "He seems happy."

"Yeah." Sad, on the verge of maybe crying - if she'd let herself, that is - Liv buries her face back against his sweater, angling her knees in so he can hug her even more tightly. "I wonder if he remembers me. Thinks about me. You know?"

"He does," Ravi says.

"I wouldn't," Liv says, after a long second. "If I were him."

"Yes you would," Ravi says simply, and holds her tighter. Liv closes her eyes, her cheek pressed against the flat plane beneath his collarbone, and thinks about nothing else but the way her body is warming up, so close to his body heat. Thinks about how her skin will feel warm and pink and normal for long, precious minutes after she pulls away - as if she's stolen some of his aliveness through just her touch. As if they could share some of Ravi's leftover humanity between them, as long as they stay close enough, intimate enough - maybe they could just keep on pretending, forever.

_Or at least until the sun comes up_, she thinks. Surely she could get away with that much.

* * *

Liv misses Peyton desperately sometimes, but other days she hardly thinks of her at all: it's much the same as with Major, who was such a huge part of her life right up until he wasn't. It went like that between them - even after they'd moved to the island. Their work kept them busy and apart so often that sometimes they felt like roommates - and there was still such distance there, even when they were together in the real sense.

If Ravi misses them too, he barely shows it - most days, it's as if they never had a different life at all, never lived anywhere else but in this house, freeze-drying smuggled brain and weeding the garden and digging a creepy cellar-slash-apocalypse-shelter in the backyard. Liv can't convince him to eat much of the real brain, so he's still all over the place most of the time, but she gets used to it. If she talks to him the right way, she can ease him away from the edge.

"It doesn't seem nearly as bad for you, does it?" he comments one morning. "The synthetic tissue."

"Split the difference - my visions from the real stuff are worse than yours." Liv shudders, thinking of the last one she'd had - when the tissue is mixed from more than one subject, the effect is a nightmarish mash up of personality traits and flashbacks that leave her shellshocked and sensitive for days at a time. "Wanna trade?"

"I would if I could," Ravi says, in a tone that's halfway to serious. "Are you going to make me dig again today? Because if it's all the same to you, we could give Thomas a shovel and he'd make the same amount of progress."

"You're not that bad," Liv says with a laugh. "Thomas spends more time filling _in_ the hole than digging it _out_."

"Still." Ravi leans over the kitchen counter to hand her a cup of coffee, and Liv notices that he does look a bit tired. Up late working again. "I wanted to work on the garden for a bit, and then I have some work in the lab."

"Sure. It's just Hattie coming today anyway, we'll get plenty done." In exchange for some help around her own house, Hattie's been helping dig the cellar - Liv probably would've collapsed it over her own head by now, without her advice. "What are you gonna work on?"

"The synthetic. I've had a thought, an idea really - if the mood swings are a direct result of the compounds I used in the synthetic, then couldn't I alter them with the same things we treat those symptoms with, in human patients? Antidepressants, mood stabilizers - it's worth a try, at any rate." Ravi drains his coffee in one long gulp. "I know what you're going to say, and no I wasn't planning on testing it on myself - "

"I sure hope not," Liv says. "But Benny and The Jet!"

Ravi's newest pair of zombie rats, Benny and The Jet, have become more like pets than test subjects to Liv, to Ravi's disdain and indulgent amusement. "Just a small amount, not enough to hurt them. They'll be fine."

Liv suspects that even if they aren't, Ravi would try to replace them behind her back anyway, and simply _tell_ her they were fine. She's been diligently checking the little brown spots on The Jet's back for this reason. "Uh huh."

"Really, darling, don't worry. I'll be careful," Ravi says, the endearment seeming to slip out without his notice. "You want the rest of this pot? I'm done, I think."

"Sure," Liv says, a bit nonplussed, watching him in amusement and waiting for him to do a double take, blush, anything. But of course, he doesn't, and Liv sits there in the kitchen for a long time after he leaves, drinking coffee she can't really taste and thinking about it.

"He called you 'darling' last week," Hattie says, when Liv tells her about it later. It's been quite the bonding experience - all this digging. "Remember? At dinner, when he was telling that story about your police detective friend."

Liv doesn't. "He did?"

"Couple of other times, now that I think of it," Hattie says, pausing briefly and leaning hard against her shovel. They've made quite a lot of progress - they're nearing nine feet, now, and they need to get to at least ten before they can start digging horizontally - and Liv can only barely see the top of the ground from the bottom of the hole. It reminds her rather unpleasantly of the incident with Macy, which isn't something she likes to think about too often. "We all thought you were his girl, the way he talked about you."

"It's not - it isn't like that," Liv stammers, thinking about it again, because of course she's been thinking about it. She's always thought about it a little, in the back of her head, even back in the old days, when she had Major and he had Peyton. The question was always sort of hovering there, waiting for her to notice it. "It probably doesn't mean anything."

"Yeah nah, probably not," Hattie says, shrugging effusively. "Not like he invited you to his top secret apocalypse mansion or anything."

Liv bites her lip. "We're old friends."

"Yeah! I've heard that."

Liv debates what to say for a long moment, how much truth to reveal: she trusts Hattie much more than she trusts anyone else she's met here - aside from Ravi, obviously - but there's always still that question underneath. Trust is one thing, but Hattie was right, that first day - there's different levels of it. "I don't know that we're in the right place for any of that. I think we missed our window."

"Maybe." Hattie shrugs. "Maybe not."

"Have you ever had a relationship where - " Liv stops to wipe some dirt off one cheek, grimacing at the dirt that always sticks to the sweat-tacky skin of her neck. "It was, like. More important than just sex or love or whatever. Do you know what I mean? Like it was...deeper than just that."

"Yeah, I have," Hattie says, grunting a little as she digs. "And I married him, dear heart."

Liv feels herself blush a little. "That's not what I mean."

"Sure," Hattie says, still sounding faintly amused. Liv turns away and starts putting her back into the digging, just for an excuse not to keep talking.

She thinks about it some more, as she digs: really thinks about it, allowing herself to fully go there for the first time. He's skin and bones nowadays, a far cry from the solid, lean muscle he used to have - he wasn't kidding about being as useless as Thomas, the muscle deterioration from the synthetic is much more severe for Ravi than it's been for anyone else. The night terrors are pretty severe too, but Liv doesn't mind either of those things, or the mood swings, or the kooky inventions, or any of it - she _likes_ Ravi, has always liked Ravi, even way back when, when they were two very arrogant, snarky doctors in over their heads. He was the first one to figure it out - the first one to believe her. He had her back, no matter what, and has never, _ever_ given her reason to doubt it. He knows all her habits, good and bad, and has adapted his life here to accommodate them. He makes her coffee in the mornings, and sits up with her late at night, when they're both avoiding their beds. And when he emailed her, all those months ago, Liv didn't hesitate. She dropped her entire life and ran, the second he told her to. She didn't even have to think about it.

Liv stops to catch her breath at that thought, for more than one reason. Hattie pauses too, leaning hard against her shovel and tilting her head at Liv curiously. Feigning nonchalance, Liv smiles. "What's the temperature?"

Hattie raises an eyebrow, and digs her thermometer and hygrometer out of her coat pocket. "We're at...two point two degrees, humidity is, ah," Hattie fumbles with the other gauge, which has been giving them trouble all week. "Ninety-one percent. Lookin good, I reckon."

"We can start reinforcing the walls tomorrow then," Liv says. "We'll have to be careful, once we start digging horizontally. It'd be a real bitch to have ten feet of dirt fall on our heads."

"Three meters, you mean?" Hattie sticks her shovel in the ground next to the wall. "Fine with me. Bill should be home any minute, and Rick will have made a mess of supper." She grins at Liv. "You and Ravi are welcome to come over. Unless you've got other plans for the night."

"You're very funny," Liv says dryly, pushing past her to the sloped ramp that leads out of the hole.

"Just thought I'd offer," Hattie says slyly.

* * *

She jitters her way around the house for a few days after that, nervous and feeling stupid for being nervous, but he doesn't seem to notice. It's coming up on his turn to eat again - they keep to a pretty rigid schedule, and Ravi insists on staying on the synthetic as much as possible - so whatever weirdness she's projecting, he probably chalks up to her being anxious anyway.

"Am I truly that bad?" He's always the most lucid, the most like his old, young self, in the few days before he feeds. Liv is used to it, and she likes the manic version of him too, but it still makes her sort of sad, sitting up with him on their last night before he has to eat. It always feels like saying goodbye, somehow, if only for a little while. "I still feel like myself. I reckon that's why I didn't put the pieces together for so long - the link between my moods and the synthetic. There was nobody to clue me in on how weird I was acting, after all."

"Hattie or Bill or Peter didn't say anything?" Liv asks, curious. They still haven't invited anyone outside of Hattie's family to the house, but they go down to have dinner with Peter every other week or so, and a few of the other families in town are warming up to them quite a bit, inviting them out to the small potlucks and community dances that they hold at the local church every weekend. It's really nice, actually. It reminds Liv of what the island was like, before it all went wrong.

"No. They didn't see me that often. Not as often as they do now, now that you're here."

"I really dragged you back into civilization, didn't I?" Liv asks, laughing a little. Ravi shrugs, looking sort of sheepish. "It's been good for you, I think."

"You've been good for me," Ravi says fondly, reaching out to nudge her ankle with the tip of his boot. On the porch, of course, but with a bottle of whiskey this time - Ravi can still get tipsy, if he pushes enough. And the strong stuff is still potent enough for Liv to taste it, just a little. Or maybe that's just her imagination. "I'm glad you came. I was worried about you, you know."

"I could take care of myself," Liv protests, though there's not much feeling in it. "I'm glad I'm here too, though. There's nobody I'd rather be with, in the end."

Ravi barks out a short laugh that echoes a little, against the little dome of trees that line the yard. "The world hasn't ended yet, Liv."

"Yet." Liv raps her knuckles against the wooden stairs. "That we know of."

"Right." Ravi reaches down and does the same, picking up his glass in the same motion. "Me neither. I always had a plan to get you here." He looks at her out of the corner of his eye. "Even if you'd said no. I had a backup argument to convince you."

"Did it involve knocking me out, stuffing me in a duffel bag and shipping me to Auckland on a cargo ship?" Liv jokes.

"Possibly. I wasn't in my right mind, after all." Ravi waves his glass near his temple, shaking his head back and forth. "I was a real mad hatter, remember?"

"You've always been a mad hatter, Ravi, that's why I liked you," Liv says.

"Aw. Thank you," Ravi says, sounding genuinely touched.

* * *

Way back when, they used to talk about this - in a hypothetical kind of way. What they'd do if someone found out, what their options might be, should everything go wrong. Staying up late at work, kicking their feet up on the lab tables, planning for the apocalypse. At the time it'd had the outward appearance of a joke, although Liv is pretty sure they both knew deep down that it wasn't.

In all their hypotheticals, the specific problems they imagined were more like movie plots than what the reality has turned out to be. Liv remembers arguing with him about guns and hand-to-hand combat skills, insisting that the world would turn into a no-man's land full of violent raiders and desperate bands of survivors. They debated the best way to grow their own food, to hoard gasoline and clean water, how to keep the lights on and keep the rest of the world out.

Ravi's got the garden and the big wall, she'll give him that. But there's a growing list of people - and unpeople - that have the code to get in, and Liv can't imagine a situation in which Ravi would start turning them away. The reality of the end of the world will be much sadder, more boring, and ten times as grim as anything that they'd managed to come up with, on those overcaffeinated, overworked nights at the morgue, because it all still seems so normal. They debate zombiesm on the talk shows like it's just another piece of political theatre: Meghan McCain and Whoopi Goldberg snipe at each other every day about the latest outbreaks and government sanctions, and famous people have started to "come out" as zombies, hashtagging their morning brain shakes with catchy phrases about ending stigma and asking for acceptance #deadoralive, which is just catchy enough that Liv sort of wishes she'd come up with it.

Ravi doesn't have a TV in the house for obvious reasons, but sometimes Liv goes to Hattie's place and watches it there - she misses the group TV they all shared on the island, the little community center where people would gather to watch reruns of Friends or Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, crammed together in the too-small room with its mouldy, secondhand couches. Sitcoms have plotlines about zombies, people write songs about it. There are memes, internet jokes, political controversies. A senator from Alabama is caught on tape mouthing off about "walking corpses" which causes such a tornado of outrage that he's forced to issue an apology statement. Liv watches it all, quietly, worriedly, and then goes back home and digs more of her cellar, weeds their vegetable garden, freeze-dries brain in their lab, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Ravi has a full notebook of to-do lists and plans, and Liv adds to it every day. There's never enough they can do, there's always more to plan for. They should do it all now, while they still have brain to eat, and public utilities to keep the lights on. One day, it's all going to disappear, and there won't be any warning. It will all be as banal as the daytime scroll on CNN: one day it's there, and the next, it's just not.

Their temporary workaround for the issue of Ravi's mood swings is more of a get-it-over-with approach; Ravi eats a large portion - enough to keep him fed for about a month - which of course makes him zanier than ever for about three days. From there on out, he's mostly fine - but of course, those three days are always...ah. Interesting.

The synthetic is mainly what the other zombies in the area are living off of now, especially since Ravi's source at the morgue has been cut off. None of the others have reacted as violently as Ravi - another tick of evidence towards Liv's theory that the vaccine makes Ravi a special case. (Liv wouldn't have minded to be wrong about that, though.)

Mostly he acts drunk. It's funny until it isn't, like the time last month when Liv caught him on the roof, trying to do something weird to the tiles. She's still not sure what it was - all he kept saying was that he was "proofing them, Liv, proofing them, I don't know how else to say it!" - and when he'd come down from the brain high, he hadn't been able to explain.

"I - I think I meant waterproofing?"

"You had a bucket of _tar,_ Ravi."

"I'm not saying I was being logical, I'm just saying that's what I thought I was doing," Ravi says, frowning at her mournfully. "You better start locking me up, I think."

So that's what they do. It reminds her sickly of the house on the island where they'd take the zombies who'd refuse to eat. Some of the newer ones were squeamish about it, refused on moral grounds or whatever, and got dumped there by the MPs who didn't want to deal with it. In those cases, they could do little else but lock the poor person up and wait for it to happen.

"This feels like a werewolf movie," Liv complains, watching as Ravi screws a deadbolt onto his bedroom door. The _outside_ of his bedroom door. "I still think you should let me be in the room with you. In case something happens."

"I don't think I'd hurt myself, though I appreciate your concern," Ravi says absently.

"Sounds like something a werewolf would say a couple hours before he chews his own leg off."

Ravi's face scrunches in disgust. "Thanks for the vote of confidence, Liv."

"I'm just saying!" Looking idly around his room, Liv picks up the dog-eared copy of _World Made by Hand_ that is a permanent fixture on Ravi's nightstand. "I could distract you, maybe. From whatever zany thing the synthetic makes you wanna do."

Ravi falters visibly, laying the screwdriver aside and letting the bolt hang, half-fixed, from the door jam. "You really are worried, aren't you?"

Liv ignores the question, picks up the book and flips it open to a random page, the margins of which are covered in Ravi's scribbles. The entire book is like that by now. "Doesn't this _particular_ novel hit a little too close to home now? In terms of bedtime reading."

"Which is exactly why I've been re-reading it so much," Ravi says, walking over to sit next to her on the bed. He takes the book from her hands gently, flipping through the worn pages briefly before setting it aside. "You should try it."

"No thanks." Liv wrinkles her nose. "Real life is depressing enough, thanks."

Ravi quirks a smile at her. "There's a library in town, you know."

"I know."

"We should start a library," he says, leaning back on his elbows. After a second of craning his neck, he sighs, a loud huff of air, and lets himself fall the rest of the way. Liv carefully lies down next to him, aligning their shoulders together, angling her gaze up at the ceiling. "Our own. Start collecting books - maybe DVDs and things, too. I mean, you never know."

"Remember that tabletop game you tried to get me to play? The apocalypse one?"

"Apocalypse World," Ravi says instantly.

"Peyton played it with you that one time. She told me she played a cult leader, or something." Liv smiles sadly. "An 'apocalypse librarian' sounds like a character in one of those things. That's what made me think of it."

"Peyton was excellent at D&D," Ravi replies, sounding faintly nostalgic. "It got to the point where we'd start to fight about it for real, which is when we stopped playing together."

"Makes sense. You're both competitive as shit."

"Yes, that was one thing we had in common." Liv feels him turn his head to look at her, the movement making the sheets beneath them rustle slightly. "I'll be fine, you know."

Liv fumbles for his hand, finding herself on the verge of tears, emotion jamming up her throat and making it hard to reply. "I know."

"I don't just mean tonight. I mean - "

"I know," Liv says again, bringing his hand to her mouth for a kiss. His skin is warm beneath her lips, flushing her entire face, like opening a hot oven in a cold room. It always shocks her at first, before she gets used to it. "Ravi…"

"Hm?"

Liv presses the flat of his palm against her chest, holding it flat with her own hand against her collarbone. "Whatever happens. It'll be you and me, and I'm - I'm glad. Thank you for bringing me here."

"Thank you for coming." Ravi doesn't sound all that calm himself, his voice deeper than usual, as if he's pushing through some quiet emotion of his own. "I was alone before I met you, you know. And I didn't want to be alone at the end."

Liv lets her eyes close, the tear-blurred ceiling fading into grey darkness. Is it ever simple? Is it ever as black and white as a movie? Once upon a time, she thought it could've been. Girl meets boy, girl dies, girl wakes up. You can't go back for a redo, but you can make choices from there - you can choose left or right, up or down. Why not reach out and scratch somebody, make the story more complicated? Put on a mask, act out some fantasies? But at the end, sometimes, it ends how it started: kicking your feet up with your best friend, talking about the apocalypse.

Ravi flexes his palm against her skin, leaning in to press his forehead briefly against the side of her head. "I should finish the lock, darling."

"Yeah." Liv clears her throat and lets his hand go, flexing her fingers in the absence afterwards. "And I have _some_ books of my own already, thank you very much. I'm gonna finish _Persuasion_ tonight. Finally."

"You've been trying to finish that book for a month," Ravi says, amused. "Please tell me you're not planning on camping out on the floor of the hallway."

"Okay, I won't tell you that," Liv says easily. Ravi shoots her a withering look. "I'm not really an Austen person. And they never made a decent Persuasion movie adaptation, so I have to take your word for it that it's the best."

"Yes, you're much more of a _Jane Eyre_ type," Ravi says. "Or _Wuthering Heights._ Brooding on the moors, beating your breast, et cetera."

"I don't brood," Liv says, frowning. She sits up to watch him as he returns to the lock, smiling fondly at the sharp lines of his shoulders as he wrestles with the screwdriver. "I...contemplate. In a serious manner."

"Uh huh," says Ravi. "All I'm saying is, if we end up at the end of the world with nothing to read but Anne Rice and Edgar Allen Poe, you and I are going to have words."

Liv smiles at his back, feeling tears prick at the edges of her eyes again. _Whatever happens_, she thinks. Plans A through D are rock solid, and as for the rest of the alphabet - they're working on it.

When she catches him sneaking a look at her in the reflection of the window, she quickly scrunches up her nose and crosses her eyes. He snorts with surprised laughter. "Hm. Doesn't Anne Rice write werewolf stories, Ravi?"

"_Vampires,_ Liv. She writes about _vampires._"

Liv shrugs. "Same thing. Different wardrobe. We're all dead meat in the end. You know what I mean?"

Ravi grins. "What else is new?"


End file.
